Dealing with Information Overload, Part I
How many tabs do you have open on your internet browser at the moment?
If you are like me, you probably have more than five, each tab relating to completely different tasks. At least half are those tabs are probably unrelated to what I should be doing at the moment:
It’s an endless cycle of clicking through links, reading halfway through the next page and then clicking on more links, until the number of tabs open grows, often exponentially.
Here is a solution that you can implement to solve this problem, that I implement myself regularly whenever I run into this problem.
The first thing to do is to download OneTab, a Chrome or Firefox extension that helps to reduce tab clutter. All you have to do once it is installed is to click on the OneTab extension icon on the Chrome or Firefox extension menu, and all of your current tabs will be collapsed into a single tab.
Your tabs will still be there, but instead of taking up space on your web browser, they will be listed under the OneTab tab. You can click on any link in the list, and it will pop back as an individual tab again.
Whenever I notice that I have more than 5 tabs open, I’ll click on the OneTab icon, and I instantly feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I’m able to focus more clearly now that I don’t have a million tabs open. I save time, because I no longer have to navigate through all of those tabs, since they are now listed in a single list that is easy to read. I also find that this act also allows me to stop procrastinating.
Many times, when we are caught in that cycle of repeatedly opening new tabs to read, we are actually procrastinating. We are caught in a procrastinating loop, and it often takes some kind of action, such as closing all of your tabs, to break out of that loop (more on breaking this procrastination loop here). OneTab allows you to do all this, without actually losing your tabs, or having to manually save them somewhere else.
Information overload is something that many people experience, especially now with so much information available to us, often for free, on the internet. I know I have experienced this myself firsthand, and have struggled with it for a long time.
This post is the first in a series aimed to help people better handle information overload. If you would like to read more, please follow my blog on Quora at Hungry Minds. You can also follow me on Twitter if you would like to continue the conversation there!
Written on June 30th, 2016 by Paul Le