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My Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open

4 April 2019

By Brendan Epps

I’m a visual person and my attention flits from one thing to the next, only three times as fast as it sounds.  I could be working on one thing.  Out-of-sight, out-of-mind, applies to me almost too literally.  If I don’t have visual reminders, it’s easier for me to forget things; usually, it’s my fear of forgetting that leads me to open multiple tabs in my brain.

Benefits
Sometimes, having multiple tabs open can be beneficial.  I can open a new tab that piques my interest, so I don’t lose the thought of the moment and can return to the original task at hand.  When doing research, I can gather multiple resources without losing track of the original item.  However, those instances relate to a computer, but not with our minds.  Having multiple mental tabs open is essentially multi-tasking, which studies show to be ineffective and in most cases, not a real thing.  Often, what we do is switch-tasking, going from one task to another in rapid-succession.  It tricks us into thinking that we’re doing several things at once.  In reality, we’re just partially working on things one-at-a-time, which usually takes longer than completing each one individually.

Too Much of Anything...
Having multiple tabs open in your mind is not necessarily a negative; but too many tabs, like too much of anything, can be.  We have different thresholds of what we can process and how we take information.  For some, like me, taking in multiple inputs at once can actually help focus.  There may be personality, mental, and medical reasons you do this.  If you find yourself with too many tabs open—as opposed to multiple, or even a lot--on a consistent basis, please consider medical or professional help. 

Mental Clutter
Those brain tabs could be mental clutter.  I don’t buy a lot of “stuff” per se, but I’m an information pack rat.  I still have newspaper clippings from decades ago that I keep telling myself I’m going to read.  There may be a quote or reference I could use later on.  Mental clutter, like physical clutter, causes problems.  It gets in the way.  Though you can’t see mental clutter, it can get in the way of our thought processes.  Sometimes, trying to remember too much keeps us from remembering.

Challenges
When a computer has too many tabs open, it slows the processing speed and opens the door for errors.  The computer has to work harder to keep refreshing the information on information you aren’t using.  Likewise, when we keep too many tabs open in our minds, it ends up doing exactly what we’re trying to keep from happening:  we forget, or make less-than-ideal decisions.  Our minds become overtasked and distracted, which keeps us from thinking clearly.

What Do I Do?
Some options to reduce the clutter of having too many tabs open are:

  • Close tabs you don’t need.  Let go of unimportant information.
  • Save information you want to keep, but aren’t currently using.  Mentally, that could be writing things down so you don’t have to remember them.  And being organized with a filing system.  Evernote lets me keep notes, reference, and websites all in one place when drafting these blogs.
  • Give yourself grace to forget.  My biggest challenge as an information pack rat is fear of forgetting something.  Obviously, I’m going to forget things, and so far, nothing I’ve forgotten has proven catastrophic, although I’ve had a few close calls on the honey-do list.

Having the tabs open isn’t a problem.  Leaving them open, opening more without closing a few, can become one.  Make time to declutter your mind.