March does something strange to people. The weather shifts by maybe four degrees, the light stays a little longer in the evening, and suddenly everyone is convinced they are about to completely reinvent themselves. New hobby. New routine. New apartment, maybe. A whole new version of themselves that has been waiting patiently under the winter coat, ready to emerge the moment the temperature clears ten degrees Celsius.
This is when the tabs start.
It begins reasonably enough. You look up one thing — a language learning app, a recipe from a cuisine you’ve never cooked, the proper way to start running without destroying your knees. Reasonable. Responsible, even. But one link leads to another and another, and forty minutes later you have twenty-three tabs open across two windows, a browser that sounds like a laptop fan in crisis, and absolutely nothing to show for it except a vague, pleasant sense of possibility.
The tabs are not research. The tabs are hope, cached.
We open them because closing them feels like giving up. That tab about pottery classes in your neighborhood — closing it means admitting you probably won’t go. The one about learning Spanish in three months — closing it means confronting the fact that you said the same thing last March. So they stay open, accumulating, each one a small promissory note to a future self who is more organized, more ambitious, more consistent than the current one.
Eventually the browser crashes and takes them all with it. And honestly? The relief is enormous.
Here’s what I’ve started doing instead. Rather than opening forty-seven tabs and pretending that constitutes a plan, I give myself one starting point — something like a 주소모음, a curated collection of actual destinations rather than an infinite search result that breeds more search results. Find the category. Pick a direction. Go there. Close the laptop.
It sounds almost aggressively simple. That’s the point.
The tab-hoarding habit is, at its core, a procrastination strategy dressed up as productivity. It mimics the feeling of making progress while deferring every actual decision to a later version of yourself who will, statistically speaking, also defer it. The browser becomes a waiting room for intentions that never quite make their appointment.
Curation breaks that loop. When someone else has already done the work of gathering and organizing, you’re no longer shopping for a starting point — you already have one. The decision fatigue that sends you spiraling from tab to tab collapses into something manageable. Here are the options. Pick one. Begin.
Spring is genuinely a good time to start things. Not because of any cosmic significance in the calendar, but because the light is better and the air smells different and humans are suggestible creatures who respond to environmental cues more than we’d like to admit.
Just don’t open twenty-three tabs about it first.
Close twenty-two of them. Keep one. Go.
