how many tabs are too many tabs?
An investigation into the creative agency's most persistent productivity system: refusing to close anything, just in case it's useful later.
Stop what you're doing and count your tabs.
Go on. Actually count them.
We'll wait.
Okay first of all , what is wrong with you? Second of all, same. Third of all, welcome. You are among your people.
Here at the agency, we have been studying this condition for years. Not formally. Mostly just by looking at each other's screens during Teams calls and silently judging while also recognizing ourselves entirely. The tab count in this building on any given Tuesday afternoon could comfortably power a small anxiety attack and a very good campaign. Sometimes both at once.
Because here's what nobody tells you about working in a creative agency: the tabs are not a symptom of disorganization. The tabs are the work. The tabs are the thinking. The tabs are forty-three threads of curiosity that haven't connected yet but will — probably at 11pm, probably when you're trying to sleep, probably in the shower the next morning when you can't write anything down. Every tab is a bet on a future idea. And we are not the kind of people who fold early.
This Is Not A Problem. This Is A Process.
Civilians see a browser with 80+ tabs and think: this person needs help.
We see a browser with 80+ tabs and think: this person is in the middle of something big.
Every tab is a thread. Every thread is an idea. Every idea is potentially the concept that cracks the brief, lands the client, wins the pitch. You don't close threads. You follow them.
Sure, the laptop sounds like it's attempting liftoff. Sure, the IT guy has sent three "gentle reminders" about memory usage. Sure, a tab crashed and took four others down with it like a creative domino effect nobody asked for.
But what if Tab 47 was the one? What if that obscure Brutalist architecture deep-dive, opened at 11:43pm on a Tuesday, is the visual reference that changes everything for the rebrand? What if the random tab about the history of Japanese convenience store packaging is exactly what unlocks the retail strategy that's been sitting half-baked in a Google Doc for two weeks? You cannot know. So you cannot close it.
This is not hoarding. This is due diligence.
A Guided Tour of the Agency Browser
Every device in this office tells a story. Let us walk you through it.
The Strategy Tab Graveyard.
Somewhere in there is a 2019 Think with Google article, a McKinsey report that was skimmed to the third paragraph, and a competitor's website that was opened to "keep an eye on" sometime around Q2. They have not been read since. They will not be read. They are ambient knowledge now , absorbed through proximity alone, like sitting next to a smart person and hoping something transfers.
The Reference Board That Lives in Tabs.
Canva has mood boards. Shared drives exist. Someone even made a beautifully organised folder structure with venue references, stage designs, registration flows, branding assets, and “FINAL_FINAL_v2” presentations.
And yet, here we are:
fifteen tabs deep into corporate event references, two global summit aftermovies playing side by side, screenshots from a product launch in Dubai, a leadership townhall setup from Singapore, an airport installation because “the spatial flow feels premium,” and a blurry photo from a 2014 conference stage that nobody can explain but everyone agrees has the right energy.
The event deck is the tabs.
The tabs are the event deck.
This is fine.
The Client Research Spiral.
It started with the client's website. Then their LinkedIn. Then their CEO's LinkedIn. Then an article the CEO was quoted in, which led to an industry report, which mentioned a competitor, which had a surprisingly interesting campaign, which was made by an agency in Amsterdam, which has a careers page that is honestly quite beautiful and now we're on their About page reading about their founding story and it's been fifty minutes and we know everything about the broader landscape and nothing about what the client actually wants. Is this billable? We're going to say yes. We're going to call it immersion.
The "Send This to the Team" Tab.
Opened with full intention of dropping it in the Slack channel immediately. That was Wednesday. It is now Friday afternoon and the cultural moment that made the link relevant has quietly passed. The tab stays open anyway. Out of respect.
The Tab That Is Simply a Blank Google Doc.
Something was going to go here. Ideas, maybe. A framework. The beginning of a deck that felt very urgent at some point this week. The tab cannot be closed until we remember what it was for. We may never remember. The doc remains open, a white rectangle of pure potential and mild dread.
The Tool Someone Mentioned at a Conference.
Clean landing page. Promising copy. A free trial that starts automatically and ends in fourteen days. We will not use it during the free trial. We will receive the upgrade email with mild guilt. The tab is a placeholder for a version of ourselves that is slightly more organized and has fully explored all available productivity tools. We respect that version. We are not that version.
Philosophical Defence of Too Many Tabs
The productivity world talks a lot about focus. Deep work. Single tasking. Intentional browsing. There are entire books, podcasts, and morning routines built around the radical idea that you should close the tabs and concentrate on one thing at a time.
With the greatest possible respect: those books were not written on deadline, with a client who wants something "fresh but familiar, premium but accessible, disruptive but also something the whole family can connect with."
You need the tabs. The tabs are the extended mind. The tabs are physical proof that the thinking is still alive, that the work is still breathing, that you have not yet decided what the answer is because the answer is still becoming something. The moment you close all your tabs; you are telling yourself the exploration is over. The exploration is never over.
Every great piece of work that has existed , every campaign that made people feel something, every brand that meant something, every idea that seemed obvious only after someone had it , was preceded by someone with too many windows open, following a thread that seemed irrelevant, finding a reference that didn't make sense yet, letting two unconnected things sit next to each other in their brain until they became one connected thing.
The tab was the breadcrumb. The browser was the process. The chaos, frankly, was the strategy.
When It Has Actually Gone Too Far
We believe in the tabs. We will defend the tabs in any room. But we are also honest people, and honesty requires us to acknowledge that certain thresholds, once crossed, indicate that something has shifted from productive creative chaos into a situation that warrants at least a brief internal check-in.
You have gone too far when Chrome asks if you'd like to continue where you left off and where you left off was three computer restarts ago and a completely different project phase.
You have gone too far when you find a tab open from a previous campaign. For a different client. In a category you no longer work in. From what the browser history suggests was a Tuesday in March that you have no memory of.
You have gone too far when a tab crashes, taking three others with it, and your first emotion is not frustration but relief. A natural culling. The browser deciding for you. You thank it privately.
You have gone too far when your tab bar has become entirely symbolic, the tabs compressed so small they are just coloured squares, a mosaic of pure intention, an abstract painting of everything you meant to think about but haven't yet. At that point it's not a browser. It's a mood board. An accidental one. Arguably your best one.
You have gone too far when a colleague shares their screen in a meeting and has fewer than ten tabs open and the entire room goes silent for a moment, unsettled, the way you'd feel if someone told you they don't really dream or don't mind Mondays. Something about it feels deeply, inexplicably wrong.
The Tabs We Carry
Maybe the strange thing about tabs isn't how many we keep open.
It's what they quietly represent. A half-finished thought. A reference worth returning to. A problem still being solved somewhere in the background. Every open tab is proof that the thinking hasn't stopped yet. And maybe that's why closing them feels oddly dramatic.
Not because the information matters equally. Most of it doesn't. Some tabs are accidental. Some are outdated. Some have clearly outlived their purpose by several business days. But mixed in between them are the pieces that mattered while the work was becoming itself. The reference that unlocked the mood board. The article that sharpened the strategy. The competitor campaign that irritated us into doing something better. The random image that somehow became the entire direction.
The tabs become less like clutter and more like footprints. A browser history of how ideas happened. So yes, maybe some of them should be closed. But not all at once. Not before the work is ready. And certainly not the blank Google Doc. Never the blank Google Doc.
PS: This article was written with 61 tabs open. By the time of publication, it was 84. Three were about this article. One was about why octopuses are so intelligent. We stand by all of them.
- Vasundhara Bhattacharjee
