What Happened When I Used One Browser Tab for a Month

How often do you find yourself multi-tasking? I do this all the time. But do you ever catch yourself focusing on too many things? Again, I do this too. When I found this article, I was inspired to try it because I found the challenge to be potentially beneficial.

Sometimes I would have a tab and think, "I'll just open another window, then it won't count as more than one tab." But honestly, that made it worse. Unless it was a quick internet search, I would have to switch back and forth between windows and that was more torturous than multiple tabs.

Basically I didn't let the tab count expand over two. But almost immediately, I noticed that my attention wasn't divided amongst tons of different topics and I was able to better focus on what I was watching or reading. If I had two open, one of them was bound to be close within a matter of 30 seconds or less.

I did catch myself once with so many tabs and windows that I could physically feel my mind splitting its attention. I wasn't able to focus on the first window I opened and I actually got mentally stressed seeing how many windows AND documents I had to navigate.

Here are a couple of ways I was able to successfully complete this challenge.

1. Add the article to the reading list.

The fact that I never went back to some of those saves says a lot.

2. Add videos to your "Watch Later" list.

When I have free time later, I go back and watch as many or as few of the videos as I want. Most of them are for entertainment, so they're not that urgent to view anyway.

Things I noticed after the month was up

1. By using multiple tabs, I can feel myself being distracted.

If I am reading an article and have a video playing in the background, I cannot mentally focus on both. It's more torture than anything now.

2. I got more focused and (dare I say) more productive.

Paying attention to one item at a time definitely upped my productivity factor, to say the least.

3. It changed my mindset to be more single-tasking rather than single tabbing.

Obviously using only one browser tab at a time is super difficult, especially when you might need two or three tabs for one task you're trying to accomplish. Realizing this helped me minimize all the jobs I was trying to do at once, which automatically helped cut down on how many tabs I was using.

Tell me if you try this challenge; Even if it's only for a week, I would love to hear about your experience. Thanks for reading!