On keeping forty tabs open and finishing none of them

My browser is currently pretending to be a filing cabinet.

There are tabs for a Rust crate I wanted to test, two pages about medieval water mills, the admin panel for a resin print order, a Pathfinder rule I looked up during a session and never closed, and one article whose title I no longer understand. I opened it. I must have had a reason. That reason has left the building.

I used to do the whole performance of fixing this. Save everything to a read-later app. Sort bookmarks into folders. Close all tabs on Sunday night like a man entering a monastery.

By Tuesday it was back.

The pile is not random

The annoying part is that the mess is useful.

Not always. Sometimes a tab is just shame with a favicon. But a lot of the time the open browser is the closest thing I have to a map of what my head is doing that week.

The history tabs bleed into the tabletop stuff. The tabletop stuff turns into a software feature. The software feature makes me look up something about UI state or vector search or why a Docker volume is being dramatic again. Somewhere in there a new project starts making sense.

This is not a productivity recommendation. Please do not make your life worse because a man on the internet has romanticized his tab problem.

What changed

I stopped treating every open tab as a promise.

Some are active work. Some are sparks. Some are compost. Every few weeks I skim the pile and close the ones that no longer tug at anything. The rest stay open until they become code, notes, an argument with myself, or nothing at all.

That last category matters. Curiosity does not owe me a deliverable every time.

malkav.pro is basically the version of this that I am willing to show people: a few windows kept open on purpose, with slightly better typography.