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Ask HN: How do I change my wife's browsing workflow?

2 points by glaberficken ↗ HN
My wife permanently keeps 100+ browser tabs open "to check one day". I have tried everything to get her to realize she is wasting a lot of time waiting for the browser to respond when she could easily bookmark things for later and keep the session leaner.

I have tried introducing her to read later style services, bookmark all tabs into a folder, session saving browser extensions, but nothing has worked.

Occasionally she copy pastes a bunch of links by hand into Windows notepad to check later. As you may imagine that drives me even crazier than seeing all the tabs open all the time!

Do you have any suggestions on what I could show her as an alternative?

10 comments

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kognate
Breath deeply and consider that her actions and workflows are not your own. You are separate people and are both idiosyncratic. You cannot separate the parts, meaning that the annoying and beloved are both facets of the same person and that person is one you love and respect.
glaberficken
Thanks for your comment and the others as well. I understand this, sorry I seem to have phrased the question in a way that makes it seem about my frustration.

But it comes from a desire to help her be more organized in these little things. To make her day to day "lighter" and have less "to-do list" anxiety. It's not about some petty OCD self absorbed motivation =)

She has similar problems with her email (subscribes to too many mailing lists, and ends up feeling behind on everything), house chores (starts too many tasks at the same time and leaves them all halfway finished around the house).

I guess what I'm wondering is are there any writings (book, articles) that you could recommend to a person that has these traits?

thank you!

uptown
Better question: Why should you change your wife's browsing workflow?

I can't think of anything less consequential.

glaberficken
Well, you are right, there was other context that I left out and now added on a comment above.
GFK_of_xmaspast
Do you exhibit this "you're doing it wrong" behavior in other aspects of your married life?
illwrks
Doesn't all of that use a lot of ram? Why not remove some ram from her machine, wait until she complains it's so slow and then educate her, keep it that way for a few weeks and then put the ram back in.
GFK_of_xmaspast
Or alternately why not buy a few extra gigs of ram and upgrade her computer to more adequately meet her patterns of use.
glaberficken
We live a frugal life-style. There is one computer in the house for a family of 4 (couple + 6yo + 1yo). It's a 5 year old laptop running Win7 and 4Gigs of ram (with a slow conventional Hard-drive).

We will not upgrade or change this. But thanks for the suggestion.