You can never do it all: A story about how browser tabs can help you accept this, or not.

Most mornings when I open my laptop, I feel a familiarity kick in.

Click on the pinned email tab. Scan the messages.
Open the calendar tab, I already know what’s in there but still have a look.
Open another tab for Twitter and another for LinkedIn.

With each click, there’s an anticipation. It’s familiar and it’s powerful. Messages, comments, likes, replies. Oh the possibilities of what’s to come. It feels good.

As the day progresses, more and more tabs mysteriously find their way into my browser windows. It feels like I have control; like I’m deciding what will get my attention but I’m at the mercy of the next interesting link. Oh this sounds good, I’ll open this and I’ll come back to it later.

And before you know it, I can’t read the titles of pages on the tabs because they’ve taken over.

So now it’s time to clean things up. I admonish myself for letting it get so crazy…again. I manage to close about half of the tabs without much fuss. The others though, I want to keep them. Today will be different from other days. I’ll take the time to consciously consume what’s on those pages.

Haha! Silly brain.

On a micro level, all those browser tabs represent what it means to be human with one finite life.

You can never do it all. No matter how much you might feel like you can. And that’s okay. Because the alternative is to live with constant FOMO, regret, and dissatisfaction. And the truth is, most of us live this way more than we’d like.

So I try to close those tabs with flagrant disregard for the treasures within.

Because I know that there’s always something else waiting. I may discover it, maybe I won’t. It feels like an act of rebellion somehow. That’s me, the tab rebel.

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