I have a chronic illness called “I keep too many browser tabs open”-itis. My RAM is bloated with tabs full of YouTube, random articles, X posts, and freaky-ahh porn. Every month or so, I would then send those tabs to OneTab to save them, only to never touch them again. I keep them open since I don’t want to miss out on anything, but I end up not being able to keep up since I’m only a man in my late 30s with all the curiosity, yet not as much of the boundless energy I used to have in my 20s. This madness has to stop.
The American novelist David Foster Wallace once said he threw away his television because he “felt convinced there’s something really good on another channel.” He experienced what we now experience with doomscrolling. This is similar to what I experience with YouTube videos, to the point that I would have dozens of tabs of YouTube videos open at a time, and I’d get pissed once or twice every month or so and hesitantly close them.
I would skip between different videos, watching one for a couple of minutes, then switching to a different one soon after, and then cycle randomly between them. My YouTube ADHD has gotten so bad that it interferes with my writing, reading, and even gaming. I’m supposed to make videos myself, not be stuck watching others’ YouTube videos. Therefore, I have come up with six rules for myself in a concerted attempt to break this nasty habit.
1. No more than 5 tabs per window.
This is the most urgent of these rules. I have to keep it within five tabs at a time for each window or I’ll just get lost like usual. I don’t want that to be my usual, and even five tabs per window may still be too much anyway. Ideally, I only have one tab open at a time and focus on that before moving onto the next, but that’s almost impossible in this day and age.
One thing that has been helping me with research material is NotebookLM, which is Google’s AI research tool that allows you to add sources — videos, web pages, PDFs, text documents, and so on — for the AI to process and produce a summary of all that material. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be too dependent on it since that’ll just atrophy my brain’s research capabilities. However, leveraging such a tool has been a boon for me this year.
Using NotebookLM has allowed me to be better able to adhere to this rule, which I have been implementing as of this writing. Being able to post this in fairly recent succession to the last post alone is proof that I’ve become more free and clear thanks to it. Now, the question is whether I can consistently stick to it from now on.
2. No more than 2 windows.
I have two main monitors — primary in horizontal and secondary in vertical — plus a small USB monitor for my system sensors and an Elgato Prompter with TradingView open. That’s four monitors in total. The main two have browser windows open, the secondary with Messenger permanently open for messages. As you may surmise, this is a recipe for constant distraction.
Having multiple monitors is supposed to boost productivity, with research material on one and writing on the other. However, what has actually happened is that I’d have tons of YouTube tabs in one window, tons of articles open in the other, and there’d be one or two more windows in the back that I forgot about. It eats a lot of memory and keeps my system cluttered to the brim.
If I’m able to implement the first rule consistently, I should be able to adhere to this one and vice versa. I should be able to keep track of whatever is open so that I can stay focused on whatever I’m supposed to be doing at the moment. It also doesn’t help that I tend to have my taskbar auto-hide, and it’s made worse by Windows’s tendency to disable its ‘always on top’ feature at random for some reason, thus making it harder to see whatever is open at the moment.
3. Focus on one article/video at a time.
This is going to be really hard to adhere to, and I doubt I’ll be able to do so to the letter. However, there’s a great need to focus on one thing at a time or I’ll never finish reading or watching anything. I have to sit my ass down and actually finish one thing from start to finish. If it’s research material, I can always take notes on my Obsidian, which is something I’ve been doing in recent years that has really paid off.
There’s not much else to this one. It’s just another way to say “Stop multitasking.”
4. Finish the queue before clicking on more.
This is discipline I admit I don’t have at the moment. I’m a monkey who’s unable to not get curious about the shiny new thing in front of me. There’s no real way for me to ignore it and not take a peek. Perhaps the best I can do is to take a quick peek, then close it immediately. However, I know for sure that even that can spiral out of control.
You open them in a new tab, promise to yourself that you’ll get to them as soon as you can, then it sits there for hours. You then go to bed, then wake up, and those tabs are still open. It’s not a good way to live. You can save them to watch or read later, and you don’t have the habit of checking those lists in your spare time. You open them one day and see links that you saved three or four years ago. This is my life, and it might be yours as well.
Therefore, this could be two habits in one. Get used to checking your ‘Watch Later’ and ‘Read Later’ lists in your spare time, delete the old and/or uninteresting ones, and go through the remaining links. If consuming all the media you can is really that important to you, then do that instead of just keeping those tabs open since time immemorial.
If they’re videos of dances and orange cats being orange, maybe you can just pass them by.
5. If you catch yourself slipping, correct immediately.
It’ll be a challenge to stay mindful while in the midst of whatever, especially during heavy days. I need to come up with a way to mentally reset while in front of my computer, almost like the martial arts concept of zanshin — getting back to a state of relaxed alertness and sustained awareness that persists after a physical action or event.
If you’ve watched Japanese kickboxing, you’ve seen fighters with karate backgrounds who ‘strike a pose’ whenever they score a knockdown. That’s an example of zanshin.
I wonder if there’s a version of that I can come up with for working at the computer.
For now, the best I can do is if I catch myself having more than five tabs open in a browser window, it should trigger me to purge whatever I can to get it back to five tabs or under.
6. It’s ok to miss out. There’s just too much going on.
This is less of a rule and more of a reminder that it’s fine to miss out on content. I’m only one man whose life should not be directed by whatever slop is out there. With my brain’s constant desire for temporary hits of dopamine, I’ve led myself astray.
I go back to what David Foster Wallace said about television. He passed away in September 2008, so he hadn’t been inundated by social media, which definitely would’ve worsened his chronic depression. If he had such trouble with television back in the 2000s, what more with what we’ve been dealing with in 2025?
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