You've finished a meeting, but there are some details you want to add to your notes before you close the doc. You'll do it during your work block and you leave the tab open as a reminder to yourself. But first, you're stopping by a classroom for an observation, so the note-taking tool is open on your browser. Wait, you clicked the wrong tab. That one is the article you're going to read when you get back to your desk. You finish the observation and go to your PD planning meeting. You tell the team you just need a minute to open the slide deck, the planning notes, and.... what was the other thing you needed to find? Oh, right, the feedback form results spreadsheet from the last PD session. Click, click, click, search. Just a sec, everything is still loading. Your computer is just a little slow today...
Sound familiar?
If so, you're not alone.
With so much of our work increasingly done on our web browsers, coming up with a solution for the browser with thirty tabs open is a must. Having many tabs open can make us feel overwhelmed, slow us down, and slow down our devices (by eating up a bunch of RAM).
If you haven't found a solution, I have a recommendation that has worked wonders in my workflows over the years:
OneTab
OneTab is an extension or add-on for browsers like Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox.
In it's simplest use, you can have multiple tabs open, and with a single click OneTab will save all of those tabs for you to return later.
Getting Started
Go to your preferred search engine and type One Tab for [browser].
Follow the directions to install it.
The next time you're done with a group of tabs, click the One Tab extension / add-on and watch everything get saved into a neat single tab that you can return to later.
When you need to return to the tabs you closed, click on the One Tab "tab", and watch everything open right back up to where you left off.
Bundle, Save, and Name Your Tabs by Work Stream
Besides decluttering your tabs, one of my favorite features of One Tab is how it allows users to save and edit multiple tab bundles.
Here's how I use One Tab to bundle, save, and name the tab bundles I use for each teacher I coach and each project I work on.
(Teacher names have been redacted)
When I sit down to prep for or meet with a teacher, I open up my OneTab, and everything I need is ready to go.
Click Restore All and every tab from that bundle will open up to where you left off.
Here are the steps I follow to set up my tab groups:
Save Your Tabs
Open the tabs you want to save
Click the OneTab extension to save your tabs.
Open your OneTab list. This will depend on whether you've closed your browser.
If you haven't closed your browser, you can click the OneTab tab that was just saved (see Fig. 1)
At any time right click the OneTab extension > One Tab > Display OneTab (see Fig. 3 below)
Name, Lock, and Star Your Tab Groups
Click the blank title space above the tabs list you want to name, and type a name.
Click More > Lock this tab group to lock tab bundles
Click More > Star this tab group to make your most used bundles appear at the top of the list
What about you? How do you tame your tabs? I'd love to hear from you. Send in your thoughts or leave a comment. And don't forget to subscribe, share the Problem of Practice blog or newsletter with other coaches and school leaders who may benefit from these ideas.
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