The Library of Unfinished Things

ON TAB OVERWHELM AND UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Early last month I picked up my phone and realized I had nearly 150 tabs open. The last time I'd checked, it was 47. How did that happen? Strangely, I recall feeling pleased that it was under 50, as if that were the magical threshold for too many open tabs. Any number below 50 felt like I was being a responsible and smart adult, feeding my curiosity and getting things done.

I had tabs open for books I wanted to check out from the library or grab for my Kindle. There were also tabs open for recipes I would never make, several interesting articles I'd wanted to absorb about human behavior, the earth's heartbeat, and more humane hospital design. Tabs about the state of care and dying in the US, a tab that helped me to identify a dying Sphinx moth I'd found in the yard. There were several tabs of podcasts friends had shared, tabs of various documentaries I'd wanted to watch, a tab preserving my search for a staghorn beetle specimen, a tab for a meditation I planned to listen to and one for a memory training exercise that still challenges me. And that's just the briefest of summaries. My laptop tabs are a whole other animal of emailing, learning, writing and rabbit-holing.

I've been wondering why I do this, so I did what any curious human would do and opened a new tab.

Somewhere in there I encountered Maria Ovsiankina, a psychologist who noticed in the 1920s that when people are interrupted, they tend to go back and finish what they started, even when no one asks them to and there's no reward for doing so.  

That's what my tabs were: unfinished business. One hundred and fifty small, shiny objects each with its own gravity. I’d been unconsciously setting goals for myself and leaving them untended. The challenge for me was that once interrupted, I’d leave the tab open assuming that I would return to it later. But with each passing day, the opportunity to return to a given tab became increasingly remote as I continued to stack more of them up.

Pair this tendency to collect open tabs with the equally human negativity bias and I was creating a vicious loop of rumination and harsh judgment for keeping so many tabs open in the first place. Without closure, the loop cycles.

When we’re interrupted from a task, part of our attention stays behind, keeping tabs on what we left unfinished. Researchers call this attention residue. The next thing gets less of our focus, we do it less well, and over time, all that partial attention can be exhausting. Some part of me is still back in that open Sphinx moth tab, not fully present to my life. Recalling it now, I notice a warm, foamy blob of shame in my forehead.

If you experience this too, congratulations on your humanity. Life frequently feels like a fumbling in the dark, following the pull towards this strange, messy and unpredictable world we inhabit. Rather than falling into more shame spirals, I'm choosing to tend to my tabs as a way of tending to myself. 

Deliberately closing tabs, bookmarking what needs bookmarking, updating queues, or simply discarding the tab altogether is spring cleaning for my devices as much as my mind and body. And like cleaning out a neglected junk drawer, there's an initial whiff of angst (someday I might really wish I still had that scrap of patterned paper!), but because I closed the loop, that tight, grasping sense of loss is soon replaced with a feeling of more spaciousness, and that’s far more pleasurable to me than lamenting my collection of things left unfinished.

Here's how I'm creating more space by saying goodbye to all those open tabs.

Notice how it feels 

It’s difficult to perceive a habitual tendency until it’s connected with how it shows up in the body. I didn’t register that my open tabs were consuming so much of my time and energy and leading me to feel such shame until I became curious about what I was feeling, where I was feeling it and what that behavior was costing me. When I unlock my phone and see the number of open tabs counting down, there's a delightful shimmery sort of pride I can sense in my upper torso. Then, when I swipe a tab away, a satisfying feeling of closure reads as a little lengthening in my spine. My body has its own accounting of open loops whether or not I'm paying attention.

Make time 

I am guilty of massaging what I perceive are tedious commitments to myself, so I’ve started to set reminders on my phone. I don’t set a fixed time (I am not a time-blocker), as my inner rebel will shake her fist at me, but I will honor the day I’ve designated for the task. Alliterations are memorable, so I use Tab Tuesdays. It’s a weekly rhythm that suits my schedule and I now look forward to cleaning up my digital accumulations.  

Reward yourself 

When sitting down to clean up my digital sprawl, I reward myself with homemade iced ube matcha lattes. There is something so pleasurable about the ritual of carefully assembling these colorful drinks into a delicious lavender-green gradient. Some advocate having a reward at the end of your task, but I like using upfront incentives to help me get excited about the task at hand. The bonus is that I get a built-in timer: my task lasts as long as the latte.

Chunk it down 

I set a goal of closing 1-3 tabs at most. It's less overwhelming to begin with such a ridiculously low bar and I usually feel so invigorated by resolving these loops that I end up closing more tabs than I initially planned. I also limit this particular task to 15 minute chunks, or one latte. More than that and things can go sideways. It’s easy for me to get pulled into a perfectionist shame spiral. My inner critic will emerge, telling me I’m doing it all wrong and should be further along. Or worse, that I was foolish for opening so many tabs in the first place. By sticking to a small goal of closing just a few tabs, I am honoring a boundary and boosting my self trust.  

Give it a home

Not every tab needs to be read, watched or attempted before I can let it go. The book goes to my library app, the video to my queue, the recipe to a folder I may or may not ever open again. Notes get entered into my journal or a document for such things. Researchers have found that making a plan for something unfinished settles the mind almost as well as finishing it. Once a tab has a home, even if that's the trash, the part of me that kept circling back can rest.

Celebrate often 

It's endlessly easy to wrap up even the smallest of goals and quickly speed on to the next item. We rarely celebrate ourselves or our tiny wins. More often, the mind will chime in to say something so mean spirited or unhelpful that it can deflate even the brightest of accomplishments. Even a quick, private fist pump will suffice. In his book, Tiny Habits, Dr. B.J. Fogg calls this "shine." I’ve learned that my somatic experience of shine appears as a buzzy excitement around my heart and a giddy feeling of anticipation in my belly. 

As with organizing in general, implicit in this endeavor is the ability to curate and to let things go. There will be tabs I never close. Some day, I'll die with folders of unfollowed rabbit holes and threads unpulled. That's part of the deal of being mortal. In choosing to be more intentional about which loops pull my attention, and which will remain unfinished, I’m creating more space for what is most meaningful for me. My digital bookmarks are becoming my library of unfinished things and I'm good with that.

Yours in wonder,

Michelle

Inspiration and further reading

Maria Ovsiankina's original 1928 study on returning to interrupted tasks, summarized here.

Sophie Leroy, "Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks" (2009), on what unfinished tasks cost our attention.

Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier, "Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects" (2025), on why the urge to return holds up better than the memory effect.

Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2011, June 20). Consider It Done! Plan Making Can Eliminate the Cognitive Effects of Unfulfilled Goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0024192. On why giving a tab a home settles the mind.

Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

B.J. Fogg, Tiny Habits, for more on shine.