Close down everything between tasks

Starting Point

You have sufficient technological expertise to have a bunch of tabs open. You are busy. You are starting a new task. You have the feeling of being overwhelmed which you don't like.

Intended Outcome

Increased clarity. A feeling of relief.

What do do

One piece of standard productivity guidance that is mostly helpful is to concentrate on one task at a time rather than trying to multi-task. One thing you can do to strengthen the feeling that you are concentrating on one task is to intentionally close down any other applications before you starting working on your new task.

This means for example:

Here are some practical suggestions on how to do this more easily.

Closing down your browser tabs

Whatever web browser you use, you will be able to close down all the tabs you don't need quickly.

Select a tab in your browser, and right click. From here you will be able to access the Close Other Tabs option (in Chrome or Safari) or the Close Mutliple Tabs > Close Other Tabs option (in Firefox).

Tab Groups: another way to keep your tabs under control.

Chrome and Safari have the idea of Tab Groups, which allow you to have different sets of tabs for different purposes.

In Safari, I now use a Business Tab Group in which I keep my timesheet, task list and accounting systens open all the time. And I have tab groups for each project I'm working on. This means they are keep separate and don't clutter up my main list of tabs, which I use for whatever current task I'm working on.

Closing down your other applications

Often it's best to just do this manually - you can then close or keep each application as you need to for each new task.

On a Mac, you can cycle through each application via the keyboard by using Cmd-Tab to move to the next one and then Cmd-Q to quit it.

On Windows, if you click Alt-Tab it will bring up all current applications in a panel and you can close them either by hitting delete on the keyboard or clicking the X in the top right of the application to close.

One tip if you want to automate this, and are using a Mac, is to download the excellent Alfred application and then use Alfred to quit your apps using your keyboard. You just need to start typing "quit" from the Alfred pull down menu and select Quit All Apps.


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