On open tabs on and offline

How many open tabs do you have right now?

Not just, as shown above, your browser, the example above being my safari browser on my phone, my desktop has dozens of more open tabs across four separate windows; but how many open tabs do you have offline as well as online?

Books you are in the middle of reading? Stacks of magazines to get to someday? Music you bought or saved to a playlist to listen to? TV shows and films added to “your list” on multiple different streaming services? Audiobooks you have bought or borrowed? eBooks?

For myself I am actively in the midst of reading three books at the moment. The Memory Librarian as an ebook (which though I own a kindle and some tablets, I mostly read on my iPhone. The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter as an audiobook (via Audible) which I listen to when driving alone, when taking a long walk, when running errands where I don’t need to talk to people (like shopping for groceries), or at night while I’m folding laundry and doing the dishes. And in physical print I’m currently reading Still Just a Geek which as a book full of annotations and commentary embedded in footnotes seemed like it might work best as a physical print book (though I’m sure the audiobook recorded by the author would be fantastic)

But leaving aside the specific books I’m currently reading (which are all excellent and highly recommended) my point is that besides these three books (all three of which I’ll probably finish later this week) I have a half dozen to a dozen other works in some stage of being read with literally dozens of other books (perhaps even well over 100 if you count electronic books as well as physical ones) that I hope to read soon.

And I do have those 100’s of literal open tabs on my browsers.

And, of course, what many of them represent which are open ended projects and tasks — from the personal of planning family vacations or a mother’s day gift for my wife to updating my resume, applying for jobs, researching for friend’s starting businesses, exploring technology that might help me on business ideas of my own, or countless other things. Some are purely for fun and entertainment, others are “side hustles” (researching the price of various collectibles I have that I plan on selling — mostly to fund the purchase of…