I typically keep a half dozen browser windows open, each with as many tabs. I use them as reminders; things to do, blog posts or articles that I want to read by haven’t had time, current projects, stats of sites I’m monitoring etc. With CodeTek VirtualDesktop it’s easy to get things all spread out.
Lately I’ve noticed my PowerBook (1.5GHz, 1.5GB DDR RAM), bogging down. There’s no reason I should be able to type faster than a new machine with that much RAM can think. Off to track down the resource hogs…
Firefox and Safari are maintaining a 10% – 12% draw on the CPU, each! I cycle through the tabs of each looking for a site stalled or any reason for the suckage. Nothing. There are quite a few blog posts and news stories that are running highly animated ads. Not to start a rant, but these ads are using my resources to try to sell me and impacting output by wasting CPU cycles that I should be using instead. There has to be a better way…
To start, I created a folder Reads on the desktop. Whenever I find a page I need to investigate further, whether its too long to read in the current flow of work or can’t be dealt with immediately (and doesn’t deserve a bookmark yet), I drag a link to it to my Reads folder and close the broswer tab. Done. Back to work.
I find the folder more useful than bookmarks for many reasons. Its easier. Easier to drag and drop and easier to view at a glance. Its sortable. The links can be renamed to something that makes sense to me or so like items alpha sort together. Real documents, PDFs, Word, emails and text can be stored along with the links. Subfolders can be created to further categorize items by status, project or personal/work.
The folder is sorted by date, newest to oldest so the most recent items are at the top. This serves multiple purposes. Items dealing with in progress projects are more likely to be at the top and easily accessible. If an item has been around for several weeks and hasn’t been dealt with, it’s easy to see what needs purged.
This surely is better than wasting CPU cycles keeping a window around for two weeks as a reminder to do something that’s never going to get done anyway.
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