Close All Those Browser Tabs!

How many browser tabs do you have open right now? Be honest. Are you going to have a look at all those websites today or will you keep the tabs open until you find some time to review them, maybe later this week?

Every morning I open my RSS reader (NewsFire in my case) and the feeds come pouring in. Great! Fresh content! I start hitting my spacebar and scanning the headlines. But then there’s a voice inside my head warning me, “if you’re going to read all these articles, it will take you more than an hour, are you willing to spend so much time this morning just reading what other people have to say? Don’t you have to start working?”. It’s good to have this built in warning system, but then what am I going to do, because I already started hitting that spacebar and reading the news?

My RSS reading routine goes like this: I press the spacebar to jump from one new item to another. I read the headlines fast, and when it appeals to me I scan the rest of the article. If it’s very short or very interesting I might read it right away, but this usually doesn’t happen. When I like it and want to read it later I hit the return key to open the post in my browser. There’s no need to wait, I can continue scanning the articles while it loads in the background.

After I finished this process I go to my browser and what do I see? Exactly, one page with a crazy amount of open tabs. Can I just go do other work now and leave my browser like this without being bothered by those tabs? I don’t think so! The next step is going through the opened tabs and saving the articles I want to read later. Personally I like to use DEVONthink, my personal database application (more on DEVONthink in a later article). I have a script setup with a link in my browser that when clicked will send a web archive of the current website straight to my database. All articles are put in a single folder. Then, after reading a story I will manually put it in a folder in the right category. One of the beautiful things of DEVONthink is its artificial intelligence: when there’s a folder with already a few articles with similar contents you can use the ‘Auto-Classify’ functionality to automatically put the files in the right folders. All articles will be saved and (Spotlight-) searchable for later reference.

Ok, so what if you don’t have an application that can do that for you or you just don’t want to save all articles on your hard drive? There is a nice new little tool called Instapaper that might be helpful: With a button on your browser you can save any article to Instapaper. Just click on it while in an open window, and your article will be saved on your Instapaper website. Now you can just close all those tabs without losing anything and find a list of all your saved articles when you have a few free hours to read!

Photo by stopnlook