TL;DR: it doesn't matter how many tabs you have or how you close them, the value I get out of them comes down to intellectually engaging with them fully, which is exhausting and rewarding. The most valuable practice I found is "generating" out of tabs, and for that, sometimes just the tab title is enough. No tool is going to save you.

I have a few modes of "consuming" these tab piles.

1. doing in-depth studying

This is like taking 1 day to go through 1 page of a math book. It's sitting down with a tutorial and actually going through it and doing all the side exercises and then reflecting upon it. It's slow af, but it's very rewarding, and of course I learn things. Over the long term, the value of that learning diminishes, sometimes very rapidly, depending on what I focused on. I learned awk and R repeatedly, at times over months, and it's all gone. What stays are some deeper insights that were uncovered just through sheer focus. This is the "it takes a full day to close a single tab" mode.

Of course, a tab could be a textbook that actually would take 3 semesters to work through, so there's a wide range in what "in-depth" itself means.

2. reading and annotating

This is where I sit down with an article (for example using Reader) and read it with the intent of really engaging with it. I don't just highlight interesting passages, I put myself in the mindset of having a conversation with the author, of putting my own ideas against theirs. This is pretty high-intensity too, and when I do this over the weekend, I would put it in the "it takes an hour to close a single tab" mode.

This is what I actually find has the most "return on time reading". I have a fairly productive Zettelkasten thing going on, and filing thoughts that come out of articles, along with notes, is very productive, often leads to blog posts, and I have found how to make highlights and quotes and crosslinking work for me.

The downside is that usually, for every tab closed, 80 more get opened. I can reasonably process about 5-6 tabs this way during a work week, maybe 10 if I'm pushing it. On holidays I would average 5-6 per day, just because you get more efficient as you go.

3. just reading

This would be just reading a tab for fun. Personally, this happens if I just opened a tab. I rarely go back to an old tab and then just read it for fun, usually it's just more dopamine-rewarding to go open a fresh tab on HN :) This is fairly fast, and usually pretty transient in terms of "return on investment". Sure maybe over years you get something out of it, but I consider it entertainment (which is great!).

4. filing links

This is something I need to get better at. I think there is a lot of value of just looking at the title of a tab, quickly scrolling through it, and then discarding it, or keeping a reference to it along with a small paragraph. I never file a link without a small paragraph about why I think it is important to keep it, which in a way is a quick way to generate a thought, like in 2. Just the fact of writing that paragraph means I probably get more "value" (as in, it will help me generate my own knowledge in the future) than actually reading it like in 3, because I actually "created" something myself.

If that little paragraph is stored in a relevant location, it means that the next time I want to study that topic or look something up, I will find it, along with its link, and immediately get context. That is actually extremely valuable. This filing of links is something I am not very good at, and definitely want to work on more.

A concrete example: I stumble across the [the Fennel programming language](https://fennel-lang.org). Incredibly interesting to me, but also something I feel would deserve a few months if not a year of attention to "really" get it. I can file it away under Lisp / Lua / Programming Languages and my daily log in my obsidian vault, maybe skim the website and make a little bullet point list of points I find interesting, link a HN discussion. This takes about 2-5 minutes per tab. It is also exhausting work, if I do this for two hours, I'll be ready to just plop down in front of Netflix.

So, is any of these better? I like all of them, and I definitely had to build workflows for 1, 2, 4. I am content now knowing that there is no solution, and feeling like you can process 800 links a day is impossible. Instead I focus on time-boxing "quality time", and just close all the tabs once I'm done, there'll be plenty of high-value quality time the next day.