I got this from Kai, who is one of the more effective people I know.
I noticed over our interactions, he'd occasionally make a reference to "closing tabs."
The fifth or so time I heard it, my ears perked up. Hey, Kai, what do you mean...?
"I don't like having lots of tabs open on my browser. I try to close them all as quickly as I can."
Huh. I press for more details. He also almost always closes every tab by the end of the day.
This seemingly makes sense to me. I didn't act on it right away, but the thought percolated.
And then, later, I made an addition to it to the end-of-day template I fill out every evening:
ANALYSIS:
What did I do right?
What did I do wrong?
What environmental factors affected me?
What would I do differently if I had the day to live over?END OF DAY:
Finished Eating:
Brief mindsweep/project sweep:
Close Tabs (or justify it):
Happiness/Equanimity:
Time complete:
At first, I just wrote "Close Tabs" -- I would close every tab at the end of the day. Extract whatever information needs to be extracted, and close them.
But then I thought about it, and sometimes it's probably appropriate to have a single tab or two open. For instance, I left open "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" a few days ago because I knew I would link it in a blog post I was going to write in the morning.
So I tweaked it, making it "Close Tabs (or justify it)" -- the "or justify it" being to explain exactly why I was leaving the tab open, what was the purpose, when would I use it and close it.
What have the results been?
The gains from this small action have been tremendous.
To explain the benefits, let me tell you the action that was the impetus for me to add this --
It was when I woke up, excited for a great work day, and then accidentally saw an interesting tab I'd left open the day before.
3.5 hours later... I'd burned a lot of my great top-of-morning energy, and was upset and wondering where the heck the day went.
That's when I added the "Close Tabs" to the end-of-day routine.
Additionally, it forces me to make decisions quicker in general (I can't let them sit there; everything gets closed at the end of the day), forces me to consolidate at the end of the day and make whatever outstanding judgment calls are still undecided, which in turn makes decisions easier since I don't have to re-load the problemspace in my head, it makes it so that I have less active things going on and am less susceptible to distraction, and it frees up "mental RAM" by killing open loops off.
It sounds silly and small, but I estimate it's worth a few hours of productivity gain each week. Those hours come from the easier decisionmaking, the faster decisionmaking, not needing to re-familiarize, and a lower percentage of the time being distracted between multiple things.
Try it out. It's small, but the benefits are disproportionately large compared to the tiny effort required.