My Name Is Sudy Nym and I Have a Problem

Sudy · Post by **Sudy** » Thu Jul 11, 2013 3:18 pm

Sudy Nym wrote:
Malificent wrote:You need Pocket (http://www.getpocket.com) - like bookmarking that lets you save content for easy reading later.
Cool, I opened the link in a tab. I'll look into it.

I wrote this as a half-joke, but for once I followed through rather than procrastinating, and now I'm down to 30 tabs on my primary, 6 on my secondary, and 1 in Chrome.

Will be less after I read/follow up on some of the remaining tabs I consider priorities. Firefox is taking up about a third of a gig of RAM right now.

So basically I've just moved all the clutter to a glorified bookmarks folder. But hey, better for the mental health. Out of sight is out of mind. Except for that nagging feeling there are overflowing virtual filing cabinets lurking in the shadows that could burst open and suffocate me at any time.... Or perhaps something more like this.

Sudy · Post by **Sudy** » Thu Jul 11, 2013 3:21 pm

RLMullen wrote:When I'm finished checking OO, I'll close the browser at which time I'll have no tabs open.

Close... the browser? What is this?

Sudy · Post by **Sudy** » Fri Aug 29, 2014 10:22 pm

I've relapsed.

I have 335 tabs open across three Firefox sessions. Probably a few in Chrome, also. I want to go through them all and close or save them for later (i.e. never), but it's such a depressing chore I keep putting it off. At the beginning are the pages I never want to close because they contain important information I want to review, but I just never want to do it "right now" because it's too much like work.

Sometimes I wish my HD would just die. Thank goodness I don't have my tabs synced in the cloud. But using the Session Manager extension doesn't help.

So digital hoarding is a thing. We won't talk about my Steam collection. (Though in my defense, you can only hide titles from your Steam library, not delete them.)

Baroquen · Post by **Baroquen** » Fri Aug 29, 2014 10:50 pm

Whew... I thought I was bad, with about a dozen or two tabs. Can probably get it down to a dozen but between social media, a couple email tabs, amazon (to check daily deals), couple sports tabs, weather (for radar), google maps (for commuting traffic), and a tab for my RSS reader... yeah, that's going to be the best I can do.

RunningMn9 · Post by **RunningMn9** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 12:25 am

Why don't you just open tabs when you need them? How often during the day do you need radar or commuting traffic info?

Teggy · Post by **Teggy** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 12:52 am

One of the tabs says "the fart".

hitbyambulance · Post by **hitbyambulance** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 1:17 am

you can start by just closing the tabs with video. do you really want to waste xx minutes of your life going through every tedious one? you have to devote eyeballs AND earholes to those. too much attention needed, too much work; kill them.

Grifman · Post by **Grifman** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 1:36 am

Sudy Nym wrote:But I need it!

No, you don't. You've lived your life fine up to the point you found any piece of this info. And I hate to tell you that there's an almost infinite amount of other stuff YOU'LL NEVER KNOW!

If I close those tabs, I might never run into that knowledge again!

So, there's a lot of other info you'll never know.

And I want to write books someday.

So when you get to that point, then you do the research. Right, you'll never get to that point because you'll forever be bogged down in trivia and information overload.

Absorbing this stuff is important.

No, it's not important. I have no idea of this stuff and my life is running quite well - and so would yours.

Wouldn't you want scientific evidence you probably don't have free will? What about how much it would cost to building the Enterprise? Whether the Toronto Blue Jays have the most unruly drunken fans in baseball?!

If you ever need to find any of this info, a simple google search will turn it up for you in seconds. Until then you don't need it.

Kraken · Post by **Kraken** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 1:44 am

Why don't you bookmark those pages instead? I have hundreds of bookmarks for pages that I might or might not ever want to see again sorted neatly in folders.

Shinjin · Post by **Shinjin** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 2:27 am

Sounds like you could use a good system crash.

This is one thing I like about my work system. It periodically gets system updates forced upon it and I tend to keep quite a few applications/tabs open. This forces me to choose to save what is important before allowing the restart to occur.

TiLT · Post by **TiLT** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 7:30 am

The solution to this problem contains two parts, both of which will be painful, but which you will find yourself glad you did one month from now:

1) Close every single tab up there except the active one. Right now. I'm serious. Don't put it off, close them NOW! Don't back them up. Don't bookmark them. Don't save them in any way. Just close them.
2) Whenever you are about to open a tab in the future, ask yourself if you're going to use it right now. If the answer is "no", don't open that tab, even if you're telling yourself you're going to use it almost immediately. If you open a tab and find yourself not immediately using it after all, close it.

You've lost control and need to go cold turkey. You'll never be able to gradually reduce the number of open tabs. You won't be able to learn new habits that'll let you reduce the number of tabs you "need". You just have to get rid of them and not look back, or you'll regress.

The basic idea you have to keep in your mind is that if these pages you've been opening were so damn important, you'd find your way back to them when you need them anyway. If they're not important, they're not worth opening in the first place. It's the bloody Internet! You've got Google to find your way back to these things. If it helps, use a notebook to jot down some keywords you're going to Google later to find your way back to those articles. Not the URLs, just keywords. That way you've at least satisfied some of your collecting mania without having these things get in the way. Once you realize you never actually end up reading anything in that notebook, you'll realize what's going on.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 8:49 am

Do you do this with physical things as well?

RLMullen · Post by **RLMullen** » Sat Aug 30, 2014 10:46 am

Sudy Nym wrote:I've relapsed.

I have 335 tabs open across three Firefox sessions. Probably a few in Chrome, also. I want to go through them all and close or save them for later (i.e. never), but it's such a depressing chore I keep putting it off. At the beginning are the pages I never want to close because they contain important information I want to review, but I just never want to do it "right now" because it's too much like work.

Sometimes I wish my HD would just die. Thank goodness I don't have my tabs synced in the cloud. But using the Session Manager extension doesn't help.

So digital hoarding is a thing. We won't talk about my Steam collection. (Though in my defense, you can only hide titles from your Steam library, not delete them.)

In all seriousness, this post does sound a lot like the same excuses you'll hear from "real life" hoarders. If this behavior ever makes the transition from digital to "real life", then we *will* find you buried under a mountain of garbage.

gameoverman · Post by **gameoverman** » Sun Aug 31, 2014 2:23 pm

I use Opera(Chrome version) and what saves me from extreme Tabism is that Opera will choke at a certain point if I have too much going on. So I'm usually using from 4-10 tabs. That becomes a habit so no matter what I use to cruise online I stick to that. My hoarding is in bookmarks. Anything 'important' gets marked. Then, one day when I do an OS reinstall, I look at my exported bookmark file and only bring links in to the new browser install as I need them. I usually prune about 99% of bookmark clutter doing that.

Mrs Nym · Post by **Mrs Nym** » Tue Sep 02, 2014 9:02 am

Carpet_pissr wrote:Do you do this with physical things as well?

Not to this extent, but yes. He won't let me throw away tags from Christmas presents, even the ones that only say "To:" and "From:". When I clean up, he asks me if I'm sure I didn't throw out anything important. I sent him some sodas from the States when we were dating, and we still have the full cans tucked away in another room. That was probably 7 or 8 years ago.

Sudy · Post by **Sudy** » Tue Sep 02, 2014 11:16 am

You can throw away the Christmas tags. Just keep the birthday cards.

That one time you did almost throw out something important! Though I forget what it was.... (Also, that one time you tried to throw out the cat.)

You can throw away the Jones cans (unless they're still drinkable; in that case, let's drink them!), just take a picture of them first.

I'll respond to the other replies later. Just had to come on to refute my wife's slander.

KKBlue · Post by **KKBlue** » Tue Sep 02, 2014 9:30 pm

What I have found in my life (was just talking to a friend about this tonight too!) is until X happens to you...

Sudy, you wrote down about a wish regarding your hard drive. Please be careful what you put out there despite knocking on wood

I'm guessing one has never crashed on you or you wouldn't make that statement

I've cleaned out many hoarders and it's much, much, much easier to part with things now since doing so. Don't get me wrong, I still have things but not as many. Before our move from a 5 bedroom house to a 3 bedroom condo, I honestly spent a year going through boxes, leisurely parting with things, getting ready for the big day. When the house was sold, I went into full throttle and had organizations come to the house to further donations and limiting what we brought with us.

Regarding having windows open, I only have, at max, 7 windows open at a time. At present there a 4 open. If I can't get to something now or know I don't want to search, it's not worth me holding till another time, because that time will not come. If I'm not going to use X there really is no need for me to hold onto it any more. Better to share it or get some $ for it. I don't like to be bogged down with worthless things

Mrs Nym · Post by **Mrs Nym** » Wed Sep 03, 2014 1:20 pm

Sudy Nym wrote:(Also, that one time you tried to throw out the cat.)

That was intentional. And you said it was okay.

Sudy · Post by **Sudy** » Thu Sep 18, 2014 10:42 am

It's done. I'm down to 25 tabs across two Firefox sessions. Populated with stuff I check multiple times per day (like gmail), or articles I intend to read in the next day, stuff I need to download, etc.

In the end, I had 552 open tabs across three Firefox sessions, and a few more in Chrome. 17 tabs per row in Firefox when maximized. It would only display 10 rows at a time. Some articles dated back to December of last year, though most tabs were no older than May 2014. In recent weeks I kind of gave up, opening more and more tabs I never bothered to read due to the stress of needing to go through them all.

Most were saved to Pocket so I can read them on my phone later, if I choose. Some important ones were saved to bookmarks. Others I realized I'd already read or was no longer interested in, I closed.

Here's a sampling of the interesting pages I had open:

The Abolition of ALL Suffering
The "Wild West" of Everest
Life In the Coldest City On Earth
The $350,000 Prefabricated, Self-Sufficient House
World's Largest Church, In the Middle of Nowhere: Seats 7,000, Has Only 200 Regulars
Could There Be Extra Time Dimensions? (video)
Deep-Sea Octopus Broods Eggs for 4.5 Years
The Most Inexplicably Addictive Non-Game You've Ever Played

Lorini · Post by **Lorini** » Thu Sep 18, 2014 12:09 pm

I'm using Too Many Tabs for Chrome (don't know if there's a FF version) and I like it a lot. It lets you keep the tabs you may want to look at 'on the side' so to speak, so they don't take up prime tab space, but are still easily accessible. I hope they have it for FF because it's really good.

J.D. · Post by **J.D.** » Thu Sep 18, 2014 1:09 pm

25 tabs is still about 23 more than I leave open when I close my browser session.

KKBlue · Post by **KKBlue** » Sat Sep 20, 2014 7:05 pm

Sudy Nym wrote:It's done. I'm down to 25 tabs across two Firefox sessions.

Good for you. Now, when we ask you in a week or two... here's to hoping you still have under 30 opened.

Sudy · Post by **Sudy** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 12:09 pm

Somehow I got to 1,000 tabs. I'm not joking. I don't know how. And it was actually exactly 1,000 when I decided enough was enough. Firefox was taking like 01:30 to load. Now it takes 5 seconds.

I've never let it get that bad before. I feel like it was an extension of the depression and anxiety I'm coping with in other areas of my life. I honestly thought I had it under control after my last purge.

Mostly, I blindly closed a ton of i09 and RPS posts. In recent months, I'd see an article and think it was interesting enough to read later, but not engaging enough to spend my time on now.

I also wind up opening a large number of tabs when I'm researching something. And I just hadn't been bothering to go back and close them when I was done.

Now I have 26 tabs across two Firefox sessions on two monitors. And one in Chrome. I'm going to get rid of most of the remaining ones today. They're either sites/resources I'm constantly checking, or things I actively want to read/download/etc.

J.D. · Post by **J.D.** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 12:28 pm

My brain can't even comprehend that. The most tabs I have open when I close my browser, on any device, is maybe 3. Maybe.

Moliere · Post by **Moliere** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 12:41 pm

I have 8 tabs open and that seemed like a lot until this thread.

Jeff V · Post by **Jeff V** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 1:08 pm

I rebooted last night, so my work computer only has 16 Chrome and 4 IE tabs open at the moment. It's not uncommon to have 50 or more Chrome tabs and a dozen IE tabs. A lot of it is because our tracking/asset system likes spawning new tabs. But there are also a lot of Google docs that I'm constantly working in.

Blackhawk · Post by **Blackhawk** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 1:14 pm

Every night before bed, right click the first tab you see, select 'Bookmark All Tabs', put the date in the folder name slot, and hit 'OK.' It takes about five seconds. Then close Firefox.

When you're ready to read that set of bookmarks, go to that folder, right click it, and 'Open All in Tabs.' Nothing is lost, nothing is gone, but it may help you break the tab habit.

You'll end up with a crapload of bookmarks, but you can either ignore those, as they are less of a hassle than the tabs, or, since you have them dated, start deleting any folder older than X-months. It is easier to delete a folder than it is a story.

naednek · Post by **naednek** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 1:17 pm

Doesn't that make your PC come to a crawl? My work PC goes nuts when I have more than 10 up.

Moliere · Post by **Moliere** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 1:19 pm

naednek wrote:Doesn't that make your PC come to a crawl? My work PC goes nuts when I have more than 10 up.

This. And some pages like YouTube seem to cause more problems the longer they stay open.

Jeff V · Post by **Jeff V** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 1:21 pm

naednek wrote:Doesn't that make your PC come to a crawl? My work PC goes nuts when I have more than 10 up.

Nope. SSD + 12 GB RAM.

Lorini · Post by **Lorini** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 1:57 pm

Blackhawk wrote:Every night before bed, right click the first tab you see, select 'Bookmark All Tabs', put the date in the folder name slot, and hit 'OK.' It takes about five seconds. Then close Firefox.

When you're ready to read that set of bookmarks, go to that folder, right click it, and 'Open All in Tabs.' Nothing is lost, nothing is gone, but it may help you break the tab habit.

You'll end up with a crapload of bookmarks, but you can either ignore those, as they are less of a hassle than the tabs, or, since you have them dated, start deleting any folder older than X-months. It is easier to delete a folder than it is a story.

Great idea thanks!

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 6:09 pm

Jeff V wrote:
naednek wrote:Doesn't that make your PC come to a crawl? My work PC goes nuts when I have more than 10 up.
Nope. SSD + 12 GB RAM.

SSD won't help with what I would have thought would be massive memory problems (as in using it all up). I'm shocked that FF can even handle that many tabs being open, and not coming to a complete crawl, or crashing outright.

Too bad (for you) that they don't have the nasty memory leak problem they had a few versions ago - hey, maybe you should track that one down and dl it?!

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 6:12 pm

Lorini wrote:I'm using Too Many Tabs for Chrome (don't know if there's a FF version) and I like it a lot. It lets you keep the tabs you may want to look at 'on the side' so to speak, so they don't take up prime tab space, but are still easily accessible. I hope they have it for FF because it's really good.

They do have it for FF - sweet - thanks...sounds like something I will appreciate.

Jeff V · Post by **Jeff V** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 8:11 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:
Jeff V wrote:
naednek wrote:Doesn't that make your PC come to a crawl? My work PC goes nuts when I have more than 10 up.
Nope. SSD + 12 GB RAM.
SSD won't help with what I would have thought would be massive memory problems (as in using it all up). I'm shocked that FF can even handle that many tabs being open, and not coming to a complete crawl, or crashing outright.

Too bad (for you) that they don't have the nasty memory leak problem they had a few versions ago - hey, maybe you should track that one down and dl it?!

Well, the solution is to not use Firefox. I gave up on it a few years ago, it was just too damn crashy. I use Chrome and IE; because my corporate email is managed by Google, I can't run both my personal and corporate email in the same browser; so I run the corporate stuff in Chrome and the private email in IE.

Kraken · Post by **Kraken** » Fri Feb 20, 2015 8:44 pm

I always have a Google News "home tab" open, plus one for whatever I'm doing at the moment. If I'm working on something I might have as many as four or five tabs open. I like to keep things simple.

Giles Habibula · Post by **Giles Habibula** » Sun Feb 22, 2015 11:01 pm

Sudy Nym wrote: ...Here's a sampling of the interesting pages I had open:

The Abolition of ALL Suffering
The "Wild West" of Everest
Life In the Coldest City On Earth
The $350,000 Prefabricated, Self-Sufficient House
World's Largest Church, In the Middle of Nowhere: Seats 7,000, Has Only 200 Regulars
Could There Be Extra Time Dimensions? (video)
Deep-Sea Octopus Broods Eggs for 4.5 Years
The Most Inexplicably Addictive Non-Game You've Ever Played

I'm late to this conversation, but I totally understand Sudy's problem. And those samples are a perfect illustration as to why he does this. Just scanning the titles, they appear to be interesting to me as well, and I'll probably be checking a few of those links out. The problem is that the internet is chock full of interesting stuff to each and every one of us, ready to be clicked on or searched for at any whim of our brains, any time our brain makes another connection, which is frequently. And once your brain is curious about something, it wants to be satisfied. Shutting down those avenues before you've read about them goes against our natural curiosity and desire for knowledge.

In the old days, finding out about a lot of this stuff happened through reading books and magazines my dad had throughout the house. But I was limited to those books and magazines. If I found something I was very, very interested in, it would require a trip to the library, where I would then become a minor expert on the subject.

But now, there are no limits to what we can discover, and we're finding out that there are apparently also no limits to our curiosity. It's a terrible combination.

What helps me is the simple fact that I shut down my computer every night, so I force myself to either get busy and read what I'm most interested in before I shut down, or simply shut everything down, knowing that tomorrow, I'll be finding even more interesting stuff all over again.

Moliere · Post by **Moliere** » Mon May 18, 2015 3:49 pm

If You Leave Open A Million Tabs, 'The Great Suspender' Chrome Extension Is For You

If you have a lot of tabs open, you may notice your computer's performance slow to a crawl. Many people have complained about it. A just-updated browser extension may help silence them, though.

The Great Suspender automatically recognizes tabs you've left open but unused for a set period of time and "unloads" them, replacing them with a simple screen that says "Tab suspended, click to reload."

Post by **FishPants** » Tue May 19, 2015 10:57 pm

Get set up on Pocket.. I constantly send stuff to Pocket that I find interesting but don't have time to read. Better than a thousand tabs!

Sudy · Post by **Sudy** » Thu May 21, 2015 12:21 am

I clean up more frequently now, but it's still common to find myself sitting on 300 tabs and difficult to get below 100.

Giles H. raises an interesting point about the internet providing limitless knowledge to match our limitless curiosity. Even I remember being a kid in the early 90s and having to make do with the 75-word blurb on Halley's Comet in a 10-year-old encyclopedia. Often living in rural areas, anything beyond that required a trip to the library to browse an equally sparse collection of outdated materials. Now I can google 529,000 results in 0.23 seconds, the first of which is a publicly editable article accessible by billions 24/7/365.

It's not so much that I'm afraid of missing out on knowledge as I am of forgetting what I wanted to learn about in the first place. I simply don't have the time to read every interesting thing I come across. Some are so captivating I'm unwilling to let them slip through my fingers and out of my mind entirely.

Kraken · Post by **Kraken** » Thu May 21, 2015 2:14 am

Sudy Nym wrote:
Giles H. raises an interesting point about the internet providing limitless knowledge to match our limitless curiosity. Even I remember being a kid in the early 90s and having to make do with the 75-word blurb on Halley's Comet in a 10-year-old encyclopedia. Often living in rural areas, anything beyond that required a trip to the library to browse an equally sparse collection of outdated materials. Now I can google 529,000 results in 0.23 seconds, the first of which is a publicly editable article accessible by billions 24/7/365.

When I was a kid I found out that there was such a thing as a Reference Librarian. One could telephone this person and ask her any factual question, and she would track down the answer and ring you back. That sounded like the coolest job in the world to me. The way things turned out I'm glad I didn't take that career path.