Right now, as I write this, I have forty-seven tabs open. I counted. Three of them are Google Docs I haven't touched in a week. One is a Wikipedia page about the history of convenience stores in Japan that I opened four days ago and have read exactly two paragraphs of. There's a Stripe documentation page from when I was debugging something on Modern Retro last Tuesday. A restaurant I want to try in Peckham. A tweet thread about typography that I'll definitely get back to. Two YouTube videos I haven't watched. A Linear feature breakdown. A CSS reference I used once three hours ago. And about thirty others in various states of relevance, all of them shrunk to tiny favicons because Chrome ran out of space to show their titles.

My wife looked over my shoulder last night and said, "How do you find anything?" And I said, honestly, "I don't. That's not what they're for."

The anxiety of the open tab

There's a specific anxiety that comes with having too many tabs open. A low hum of unfinished business. Each tab is a tiny commitment you made to yourself -- I'll read this later, I'll need this, this is important -- and every time you glance at that crowded tab bar, you feel the weight of all those unkept promises. Productivity people will tell you to close them. Use a read-later app. Bookmark them properly. Organise your digital life. Get to inbox zero but for your browser.

I've tried all of that. Pocket is full of articles I saved in 2019 and will never open again. My bookmarks folder is a graveyard. Read-later apps are where links go to die a dignified death, filed away neatly where they'll never trouble you again. The whole system is designed around a fiction: that you're going to come back to these things. You won't. I know you won't because I won't, and I care about this stuff more than most people.

Tabs aren't a to-do list. They're a snapshot of your brain at a moment in time. A map of every thread you're pulling on simultaneously.

But here's the thing the productivity lot miss: the tabs aren't for later. They're for now. They're not a filing system. They're a thinking environment. The forty-seven tabs open on my screen right now aren't forty-seven things I need to do. They're forty-seven threads of thought that are alive in my head at this moment, given physical form in a browser window. The Japanese convenience store article sits next to the Stripe docs sits next to the restaurant in Peckham sits next to the typography thread, and that adjacency is doing something. Not consciously. But something.

The browser as mood board

When I worked in agencies, we used to make mood boards. Physical ones, early on -- magazine clippings, photographs, printouts, swatches of colour, scraps of texture, all pinned to a board in no particular order. The point was never to create a tidy presentation. The point was to create a field of reference. To surround yourself with the vibes -- yes, vibes -- of the thing you were trying to make, so that when you finally sat down to do the work, all of those influences were in the room with you.

That's what my tabs are. A mood board I didn't intend to make but that is exactly right for wherever my head is this week. The Japanese convenience store article is there because I'm thinking about how small spaces can feel abundant. The typography thread is there because I'm redesigning something and haven't decided on the typeface. The restaurant in Peckham is there because I promised my wife I'd book somewhere for Saturday and I keep not doing it. Each tab is a signal. Together, they're a map.

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A real tab audit: I went through my tabs one morning and categorised them. 30% were things I was actively working on. 25% were things I was thinking about but not yet working on. 20% were things I'd finished with but hadn't closed. And 25% were things I'd completely forgotten about but were genuinely interesting when I rediscovered them.

That last category is the one that matters most. The tabs you forgot about. The ones that have been sitting there so long they've lost their titles. The ones you rediscover when you're looking for something else entirely and think, "Oh right, this. This is brilliant." That's not inefficiency. That's serendipity built into your workflow. You've accidentally created a system that surfaces unexpected connections, and you did it just by being too lazy to close your browser tabs.

What your tabs say about you

If someone went through your open tabs right now, they'd learn more about you than your CV, your social media, and your bookshelf combined. Because tabs are unperformed. Nobody curates their tabs for an audience. Nobody opens a tab to signal anything to anyone. Your tabs are the purest expression of what you're actually interested in at this exact moment, unfiltered by any consideration of how it looks.

My tabs right now tell you: I'm interested in Japanese retail design. I'm building something with Stripe. I need a date night restaurant. I'm thinking about fonts. I'm reading about how Linear structures their product development. I'm halfway through an article about the decline of high street bookshops. I have a vague interest in a CSS technique I'll probably never use. And I have at least six things open that I've completely forgotten the reason for but haven't closed because what if I need them.

Nobody curates their tabs for an audience. They are the last honest space on the internet -- pure, unperformed interest.

That mess is more revealing than any "About Me" page I could write. It's the intersection of work and curiosity and daily life and long-term obsession, all coexisting in one browser window. It's not organised because thinking isn't organised. The good ideas don't come from tidy systems. They come from the collision of unrelated things. The Japanese convenience store next to the typography thread next to the Stripe docs. That's where the interesting stuff happens.

Why I stopped feeling guilty

I used to do the thing where I'd declare tab bankruptcy. Close everything. Start fresh. A clean browser, a clean mind. It felt virtuous for about twenty minutes, and then I'd slowly, inevitably, accumulate tabs again. Because the tabs aren't the problem. The tabs are how I think. Closing them doesn't make me more productive. It makes me less connected to the threads I'm pulling on.

This is the thing I've come to understand about how I work, and I think it's true for a lot of people who make things: the mess is the method. The twenty-seven open tabs aren't a sign of disorganisation. They're a sign that your brain is working on twenty-seven things at various levels of consciousness, and your browser is the closest external representation of that internal state. Some of those threads will go nowhere. Most of them, honestly. But two or three of them will collide in a way you didn't expect, and that collision is worth the price of the other twenty-four dead tabs.

I built a Japanese language learning app because a tab about Japanese convenience stores sat next to a tab about spaced repetition for long enough that the idea became inevitable. I built CultureTerminal because a tab about RSS feeds sat next to a tab about cultural criticism for a fortnight. I didn't plan these connections. They happened because I left the ingredients lying around long enough for something to form.

So no, I won't be closing my tabs. I won't be using a read-later app. I won't be organising my digital life into tidy folders and pristine bookmark collections. My forty-seven tabs are a working document. They're a map of my mind. They're ugly and disorganised and half of them are probably redundant. But they're mine, and they're doing more work than any productivity system ever could.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back and actually read that article about Japanese convenience stores. It's been four days.