I Had 6 Side Projects Open in One Browser Window. Here's What That Was Costing Me.
I Had 6 Side Projects Open in One Browser Window. Here's What That Was Costing Me. I counted once, on a normal Tuesday. 41 tabs, one window, six different side projects. A repo here, a localhost there, a Stripe dashboard, two Notion pages, a half-read Stack Overflow thread I was scared to close. I was using a tab manager to hold it all together. Save the session, restore it later, feel organized. It worked, in the sense that nothing got lost. But something was off, and it took me a while to name it. The tab manager was keeping my tabs. It was not keeping my projects. And the gap between those two things was quietly costing me. The number that bothered me I did a rough audit of one week. Every time I sat down to work on a project, I had to reconstruct where I was. Which task was next? When was that thing due? Where did I save that reference last month? The tabs were there, but the answers were not in the tabs. I timed it loosely. Five to ten minutes of "wait, where was I" at the start of every session, multiplied across six projects, multiplied across a week. Call it an hour, maybe more, spent just getting back to the surface before any real work started. An hour a week is not a catastrophe. But it was an hour spent doing something a tool should do for me, and the friction was enough that I started avoiding the projects with the most tabs. The cost was not really the time. It was that the heaviest projects felt the worst to open, so I opened them least. Why the tab manager could not fix this Here is the thing I had to admit. A tab manager is excellent at one job: saving and restoring tabs. It is not built to know anything about the project those tabs belong to. A tab is a URL. A project is a URL plus: A task that is due Friday A reference I saved three weeks ago and need again now A subscription renewing on the 14th A sense of what I actually shipped last time I worked on it When all of that lives outside the tab manager, in a to-do app, a notes file, my memory, rest