Time management

Remember when you had to open another browser page to to open another website. You had to constantly flip back and forth between pages if you needed more than one page. Things got even more hectic if you needed three or more. Then came tabs. All of your webpages in one simple browser. They were all listed at the top and easy to see. Then they added the ability to reopen the tabs you had open when you closed your browser. Life got easier.

At least it did until I started using tabs as bookmarks. Everytime I wanted to look at a page later, I would just leave it open in a tab. After a few days I would end up with so many tabs I couldn’t find the the tabs I actually needed to use. Instead, I end up with a lot of wasted time clicking back and forth between tabs I forgot I even had.

A couple days ago I came across a solution. An add-on for Chrome and Firefox called TooManyTabs. The program allows you to save your tabs for later and move them out of view. It sits as an icon on your browser and allows you to have many pages open for later, but keep them out of sight. It doesn’t have a lot of features, but I think that is actually what I like about it. It’s really simple.

However, after using it for a few days, I realized something else: I really don’t need all those extra tabs anyways. If I don’t have time to look at that site now, I am probably not going to look at it later either. I do still use TooManyTabs, but not as much as I thought. Instead, I just limit the number of tabs that I am allowed to keep open to five. At the moment I have four tabs open. One of those is my e-mail and one is this post that I am writing right now.

I use TooManyTabs to store pages that I have to use on a regular basis for work, but don’t need open all the time. Websites that I work on on everyday or every couple days. By keeping them closed most of the time, I save myself a lot of time having to search through a bunch of tabs.

So, if you like to have a lot of tabs open then get the add-on, but realistically you can probably get the same effect by just realizing that you don’t need all those pages open in the first place.

Last month I had bad luck with computers. My power chord on my main computer died, so I bought a new one which also burned out. No power chord basically meant that my computer was virtually useless. I decided to switch to an iMac. The reason for this was actually convenience. My dad had an iMac I bought him a couple of years ago that he was no longer using since I got him an iphone.

Losing the ability to use your computer or having a computer die makes you think about your files. I keep all of my important files backed up on an external hard drive, but that can also die. I finally decided what I needed was  a place online to store my files. That way I would have the ability to access them regardless of what computer I was using or where I was.

I wasn’t actually looking for a place to keep all of my files, but just a few select ones that I didn’t want to loose.

I looked at a few different sites, and finally decided on Dropbox for two reasons. One, it had applications on available on many platforms. Two, you start out with 2GB of space, but get an additional 250mb of space (up to 10Gb) for every person that you refer. Not a bad deal.

The user interface is also good. Dropbox shows up as a folder and whatever you put into it gets uploaded to your Dropbox file.

So here is my referral link to Dropbox. If you use this link we both get an additional 250mb of space.

Click here to Sign up for Drop Box

Once you sign up, please feel free to comment on how you like it or don’t. Also, feel free to comment if you have found a better service.