My bad habit of hoarding information
TL;DR: it doesn&#x27;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 &quot;generating&quot; out of tabs, and for that, sometimes just the tab title is enough. No tool is going to save you.<p>I have a few modes of &quot;consuming&quot; these tab piles.<p>1. doing in-depth studying<p>This is like taking 1 day to go through 1 page of a math book. It&#x27;s sitting down with a tutorial and actually going through it and doing all the side exercises and then reflecting upon it. It&#x27;s slow af, but it&#x27;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&#x27;s all gone. What stays are some deeper insights that were uncovered just through sheer focus. This is the &quot;it takes a full day to close a single tab&quot; mode.<p>Of course, a tab could be a textbook that actually would take 3 semesters to work through, so there&#x27;s a wide range in what &quot;in-depth&quot; itself means.<p>2. reading and annotating<p>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&#x27;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 &quot;it takes an hour to close a single tab&quot; mode.<p>This is what I actually find has the most &quot;return on time reading&quot;. 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.<p>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&#x27;m pushing it. On holidays I would average 5-6 per day, just because you get more efficient as you go.<p>3. just reading<p>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&#x27;s just more dopamine-rewarding to go open a fresh tab on HN :) This is fairly fast, and usually pretty transient in terms of &quot;return on investment&quot;. Sure maybe over years you get something out of it, but I consider it entertainment (which is great!).<p>4. filing links<p>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 &quot;value&quot; (as in, it will help me generate my own knowledge in the future) than actually reading it like in 3, because I actually &quot;created&quot; something myself.<p>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 <i>extremely</i> valuable. This filing of links is something I am not very good at, and definitely want to work on more.<p>A concrete example: I stumble across the [the Fennel programming language](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fennel-lang.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fennel-lang.org</a>). Incredibly interesting to me, but also something I feel would deserve a few months if not a year of attention to &quot;really&quot; get it. I can file it away under Lisp &#x2F; Lua &#x2F; 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&#x27;ll be ready to just plop down in front of Netflix.<p>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 &quot;quality time&quot;, and just close all the tabs once I&#x27;m done, there&#x27;ll be plenty of high-value quality time the next day.