Keeping One Tab Open
Tags: career, technology, productivity, focus
Published: 2022-12-18 01:14:00

---
title: Keeping One Tab Open
published: true
description: Having trouble focusing? Here's an easy way to stay focused.
tags: career, technology, productivity, focus
cover_image: https://www.justindfuller.com/keeping_one_tab_open.png
canonical_url: https://www.justindfuller.com/2022/12/keeping-one-tab-open/
---

_This post originally appear at [justindfuller.com](https://www.justindfuller.com/2022/12/keeping-one-tab-open/)_

---

<p>Recently, someone found the maximum number of tabs that Microsoft Edge can handle.
The number is <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MicrosoftEdge/comments/zgwt1f/edge_crashed_with_1600_open_tabs_clicked_inbuilt/">sixteen hundred</a>.
One tab over this and it crashes.</p>

<p>Not too long ago, I felt like my brain had sixteen hundred tabs open at all times.
Even while I focused on one task, I would keep several tabs open in the background,
mostly to remember to do things after the current task.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;d try to remember:</p>
<ul>
<li>What I planned to do next</li>
<li>The email or slack message I need to follow up on</li>
<li>Questions I need to ask my team</li>
<li>Issues I need to address</li>
<li>And so much more</li>
</ul>
<p>Even when I focused deeply on a task, I still had to dedicate a large portion of my processing
power to all these other &ldquo;open tabs&rdquo; that I needed to hold on to.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s not just a metaphor, though. This was reflected in the literal open browser tabs on my computer.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.justindfuller.com/tabs.png" alt="Tabs"></p>
<p>At any given time, I would have open:</p>
<ul>
<li>The current page I&rsquo;m working on, perhaps adjusting a component or adding a feature</li>
<li>MDN or StackOverflow to answer some question I have, related to the current task</li>
<li>Maybe a few more MDN and StackOverflow tabs that <em>might</em> be useful</li>
<li>Gmail, google calendar, jira, trello</li>
<li>Some blog posts I want to read later</li>
<li>Random tabs I opened and forgot about but I&rsquo;m not sure I&rsquo;m ready to close them yet</li>
<li>And probably a lot more too</li>
</ul>
<p>This trend of open tabs and &ldquo;open tabs&rdquo; continued until I discovered the book, <a href="https://amzn.to/3PwjIBV">Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity</a>.</p>
<h2 id="write-it-down">Write It Down</h2>
<p>Most people laugh or don&rsquo;t believe me when I try to explain how helpful this method is, because it sounds too simple.</p>
<p>If you have something you need to remember: <strong>write it down</strong>.</p>
<p>Once you write it down in a place that you can easily come back to later, you can finally close that open tab.
Once you write down everything that you need to remember, you can close <em>all</em> of your open tabs and start to truly focus on one thing at a time.</p>
<p>For this to work, you need to write it down in a place that&hellip;</p>
<ul>
<li>Is consistent across all the things you think about</li>
<li>You can trust to remind you</li>
<li>Allows you to prioritize and reprioritize tasks</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="trello">Trello</h2>
<p>For the rest of this post, I will show you how I use <a href="https://www.trello.com">Trello</a> to keep one tab open.
However, Trello is just one of many tools that you can use. It probably will not be right for everyone.
I hope what you&rsquo;ll see is the strategy I use, rather than the specific tool I use to accomplish it.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.justindfuller.com/living_on_24_hours_a_day_trello.png" alt="Trello"></p>
<h2 id="step-1-record-all-inputs">Step 1: Record All Inputs</h2>
<p>Throughout your day you&rsquo;ll receive countless inputs.</p>
<ul>
<li>Emails</li>
<li>Old-school snail-mail</li>
<li>Slack messages</li>
<li>Texts</li>
<li>Calendar Invites</li>
<li>Your spouse asking you to do something</li>
<li>You&rsquo;ll notice an issue with your house or work</li>
<li>You&rsquo;ll remember something you forgot to take care of</li>
</ul>
<p>Typically, you have a few options to handle these inputs:</p>
<ol>
<li>Completely ignore it</li>
<li>Try to remember it for later</li>
<li>Drop what you&rsquo;re doing to handle it immediately</li>
</ol>
<p>But there is another way: record the input, along with any relevant information such as dates or links, so that you can come back to it later.</p>
<p style="background: #222;">
  <img src="https://www.justindfuller.com/todo_column.png" alt="TODO Column" style="margin: auto; display: block;" />
</p>
<p>For me, this looks like dropping a new card in my TODO column in Trello.
When I notice a slack message or email that requires follow-up, I drop a card in the column.</p>
<h2 id="step-2-add-detail">Step 2: Add Detail</h2>
<p>The cards alone are useful as a prioritization and reminder tool.
However, the real benefit materializes only when you are able to decrease your mental load and &ldquo;close some tabs&rdquo;.</p>
<p>That&rsquo;s where adding detail comes in.</p>
<p>When I create a card, I add:</p>
<ul>
<li>Any relevant links to get me back to the slack message, email, or related information</li>
<li>A brief description containing whatever thoughts I have on the task.
<ul>
<li>&ldquo;Make sure to talk to XYZ person about this before responding&rdquo;</li>
<li>&ldquo;See if this has already been implemented in another system&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>A due date if there&rsquo;s a deadline or even ideal time to have this task complete</li>
</ul>
<p style="background: #222;">
  <img src="https://www.justindfuller.com/details.png" alt="Card Details" style="margin: auto; display: block;" />
</p>
<p>Details are crucial to staying focused.
With only the card you have a reminder of what you need to do, but not how to do it.
So you may find that the task itself is off your mind, but you&rsquo;re still attempting to hold on to all the extra things required to complete the task.</p>
<h2 id="step-3-focus">Step 3: Focus</h2>
<p>This is the hardest part. You now have the tools to focus on one task at a time.
But it still takes conscious effort to do so.</p>
<p>In Trello, this looks like literally one card in the &ldquo;Doing&rdquo; tab at all times.
There should always be a card in that tab unless you are actively choosing to be &ldquo;off&rdquo; or &ldquo;wasting time&rdquo; (which is a totally valid and normal thing to do, by the way, life isn&rsquo;t only about productivity).</p>
<p style="background: #222;">
  <img src="https://www.justindfuller.com/doing_tab.png" alt="One Open Task" style="margin: auto; display: block;" />
</p>
<h2 id="switching-tasks">Switching Tasks</h2>
<p>It&rsquo;s pretty common to start a task, only to be interrupted and forced to switch to another task.
This is notoriously difficult for &ldquo;knowledge workers&rdquo; like Software Engineers.
However, your cards can help you context switch easily.</p>
<p>When switching tasks, you need to be able to completely turn off the current task and focus on the new one.</p>
<ol>
<li>Write down any new details you&rsquo;ll need to remember when coming back.</li>
<li>Add relevant links, such as the path to the file you were working in or the StackOverflow answer you were reading.</li>
<li>Move the task back to &ldquo;TODO&rdquo;</li>
<li>If the new task will take more than 5 minutes: Create a card for it and move it to &ldquo;Doing&rdquo;.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="finishing-tasks">Finishing Tasks</h2>
<p>Whenever you finish a task, move it to the &ldquo;Done&rdquo; column.</p>
<p>At the end of each week, I review the completed tasks to see if I&rsquo;m satisfied with my work.</p>
<p>I like to ask myself:</p>
<ul>
<li>Did I spend my time wisely this week?</li>
<li>Did I get stuck on a certain task for too long?</li>
<li>What were the affects or results of the tasks I completed?</li>
</ul>
<p>If I&rsquo;m not satisfied, I try to understand why, and prepare to spend my time differently in the next week.</p>
<h2 id="cleaning-up">Cleaning Up</h2>
<p>The more you do this, the more you will accumulate cards.
At the end of each week, I move my &ldquo;Done&rdquo; column to a different board.
I don&rsquo;t delete the cards, because I occasionally like to browse back through them to do a longer
retro on my work.</p>
<p>I also set up an automation to remove cards that are older than thirty days.
Again, it does not delete the cards, it moves them to an &ldquo;Archive&rdquo; board.
I do this because I have a lot of ideas, but often find that they are unimportant to me a month later.
I think it&rsquo;s healthy to let go of ideas once I no longer feel they are relevant.
I don&rsquo;t need to power through unimportant tasks, just because I incorrectly thought they were important in the past.</p>
<hr>
<h2 id="putting-it-all-together">Putting it All Together</h2>
<ul>
<li>Write down every input</li>
<li>Record enough details that you can truly get it off your mind</li>
<li>Focus on one task at a time</li>
<li>Do a weekly retro on your completed tasks</li>
<li>Regularly prune your tasks to focus on only what is currently relevant</li>
</ul>