When you stick to the Two-Tab Rule, your mind doesn’t have to process that fourth item because there are only two pages at play. Your mind is tracking the 1) content, 2) purpose, and 3) location of information and 4) its relationship to every other page. Tracking things in this way isn’t just a matter of adding one additional thing to your mental queue - in fact, it adds at least four things to the queue for each additional reference page. With more than two tabs, you’re having to split your focus between the purpose and content of each tab while also trying to remember the location of your thought or activity in your active tab. This is perfectly fine because you can still maintain focus on your active tab. It’s not unusual to need to have a reference page (a separate tab with information you’re referring to for information). Your “active” tab might be a Google Doc, WordPress panel, or another tab that you’re actively filling with text. You get one active tab and one reference or “next up” tab. If you’re wanting to focus and remain on-task, try to limit yourself to two tabs - this is the Two-Tab Rule. (If you have more than three tabs open, try to remember what that fourth tab is without looking. The reality is that it’s very unlikely that you know what’s in the tab that’s four tabs after this page, hence the aimless wandering. This is especially problematic when we jump on the Internet to do some quick research, only to find that we’ve spent the last 35 minutes viewing websites with only 2 minutes of that time doing the actual research and the remaining 33 minutes aimlessly jumping from tab to tab. ![]() Now, all major browsers give you the capability of opening windows in tabs although we’ve fixed the usability annoyance, we’ve replaced it with an inability to focus while we’re viewing and working with webpages. In the early days of browsers, a perennial and annoying problem was being able to have only one window open at a time. an hour or shorter, but disabling the web for any longer feels too risky: it is easy to imagine time-sensitive emails going unanswered because you have blocked access to the internet for the next five hours.Īt its best, SelfControl allows me to temper the impulse to spend a lot of time hovering around my inbox I tend to use SelfControl in hour long chunks to allow sessions of distraction-free work in between e-mail checks.How many tabbed windows do you have open right now? Can you remember what all those tabbed windows are about? The timed function is particularly good for short bursts of productivity, ie. This relentlessness is SelfControl’s best and worst feature. Once activated, the blocks remain live until a particularly menacing timer runs down, and only some minor computer hacking will allow you to disable the app’s functionality. The app also sports a “Whitelist” function that works in reverse, disabling everything except for a handful of specified domains. When enabled, SelfControl asks you to specify how long you want to block a list of domains, up to 24 hours. SelfControl is an app for Mac OS X that, unlike FoxFilter or StayFocused, works across browsers. SelfControl provides relentless self-regulating freedom from procrastination. Of the several tools that I’ve tried - Fox Filter, StayFocused, and Freedom - SelfControl remains my favorite. ![]() Sometimes it helps to have a few practical aids in the war against procrastination. The web enables virtually all of my work as a graduate student, but it can all too easily become a powerful distraction.
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