Mental clutter doesn’t just live in your brain… it’s hiding in your tabs, too
Why everything you’re trying to remember is costing you more than you think.
There's an invisible weight you’re carrying.
It sits behind your eyes around 4pm when you've been bouncing between tasks all day. It's there in the slight tension of your shoulders as you open your laptop to "quickly check something" and find yesterday's 43 open tabs still waiting. It's the quiet exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from holding too much.
A couple of months ago, I felt it again when I sat down to order a birthday present for a friend. It was one task that should’ve taken five minutes.
Forty minutes later, I was seventeen tabs deep into... I don't even remember what. The original mission had dissolved somewhere between a recipe I wanted to save, an article about eldest daughter burnout and a new skincare product I’d heard about on TikTok that I’ve been wanting to try.
And the gift… well, that was still sitting in a forgotten tab, waiting for my return.
The invisible tax we pay
We don't often talk about this mental weight in concrete terms. But it's tangible… a kind of cognitive tax we pay for living in a world that constantly asks us to grab, save, remember, follow up.
Every open browser tab is a tiny IOU to ourselves… a small promise that says "I'll come back to this." Every screenshot, every saved post, every scribbled note is a little piece of unclosed energy. A mental loop that stays quietly open.
And those loops require power to maintain. They drain our mental batteries in small, imperceptible ways.
As you might know by now, around here we’re focused on the quiet relief that comes when we don't have to hold quite so much, throwing off the shackles of hustle culture’s weird obsession with optimisation, as if we’re productivity robots rather than living, breathing human beings with rich and nuanced lives.
So, it’s important to keep that in mind as I unpack this further.
When your tabs are a mirror
I've realised that my browser looks remarkably like the inside of my mind: a collection of half-finished thoughts, passing interests, genuine intentions and things I truly care about... all mixed together without hierarchy or home.
The more scattered my digital spaces become, the more scattered my thoughts feel. One feeds the other in a strange, recurring loop of chaotic mess.
And yet, we keep trying to manage this overflow with the digital equivalent of sticky notes stuck to every surface…
Screenshots that disappear into the void of our camera rolls. Links saved to different bookmark folders we never remember to check. Notes apps with brilliant ideas we can't find when we actually need them. Voice memos that become too overwhelming to listen to.
And we often chalk it up to just being “disorganised”. But I’d like to propose an alternative: maybe it’s more than our tools aren’t working for us.
The shame cycle that keeps us stuck
Perhaps the hardest part isn't the digital chaos itself. It's the quiet voice that says we should be better at this by now.
That everyone else has figured out how to manage their digital lives, while we're still losing links and forgetting that brilliant idea we had in the shower.
It's the subtle sting when we rediscover the trip we never booked, the gift we never bought, the book we never read… not because we didn't want to but because they slipped through the cracks of our attention.
So, what do we do in response? We try to fix it. We download another app. Create another folder structure. Start another Notes page with fresh determination.
And when that system inevitably becomes another thing to manage, we feel that familiar weight return.
And so, the cycle continues.
I spent years like this, trying system after system, each one feeling like another obligation rather than a release. Each one requiring me to contort my creative brain into shapes it wasn't designed to hold.
The alternative: a tiny act of self-kindess
I came to realise that what I probably needed was to give my brain somewhere softer to land, rather than trying to change the way it works altogether.
I wanted a way of organising things that felt a lot less like punishment and a lot more like being kind to my future self.
So, I started imagining what a different approach might look like.
What I didn’t want it to be:
A complex system that demanded perfection
Yet another productivity tool to master
What I did want it to be:
A single, calm space where everything that mattered could safely rest until I needed it again
A digital home for all those open tabs… all the things I genuinely wanted to remember
I was tired of losing the little things that make life better… the book recommendation that might have changed my perspective, the trip I'd dreamed of taking, the gift idea that would have made someone's day. And I wanted a space for all of those things, and more, that felt like a hug, not a homework assignment. It was going to have to be a place to gently catch my best ideas and inspirations without guilt or pressure.
Enter: The Everything List.
It's been one of the kindest things I've done for my future self.
Because now, when I find myself falling down a rabbit hole of tabs or when a friend mentions a book I absolutely must read, I have one calm place to put it all. It’s a place I can trust because I just pop anything I might want to come back to later in there and know it’ll be waiting for me when it’s the right time.
And it’s been the number one reason I’ve been able to close all the browser tabs on my phone on a regular basis. I honestly didn’t realise how freeing that would feel!
And the crazy thing is that it was never my intention for this to be the first template I’d offer in my Notion template shop. It just that the more I’ve been using this and seeing how much it’s been helping me, the more I’ve come to realise it’s the template I want to get into your hands straight away!
If your digital spaces are feeling a bit like mine did, if you're carrying around more tabs than your brain was meant to hold… perhaps this is the gentle answer you've been looking for too.
The Everything List is a simple Notion template I designed for people who love saving the good stuff of life but need a better way to find it again.
And it’s coming super soon.
Because I know that sticky notes and 47 open tabs are not a life strategy, my friend! (Go on…ask me how I know!)
If you want to be the first to hear when The Everything List is available (as well as snag yourself my cheeky earlybird pricing), you can sign up to the waitlist below.