I’ve gotten really hot on organizing and cleaning my space as a way to keep order and routine in my newly unstructured life. Thanks to the different variants of job searching - interviews, job applications, coding tests, add in freelance work, and the random other things that come up along the way, I wind up populating every possible idea or lead in browser tabs. So many browser tabs.

You might be thinking - group those tabs! Which I did, only to realize that’s no panacea for the cognitive load that comes with cycling through tab groups to find the right group and tab for whatever task I’m doing (did I open that repository in the job listing tabs? no… in the research for that potentially life changing project I need to start? also no… and so on). And maybe I keep a memory leaking app running in a couple of those tabs, along side some other memory heavy web pages. Either way, I browser tabs became an unmanageable burden.

So instead I have a spreadsheet with its own tabs - tabs that contain cells and text instead of web pages with video and pop up ads. Being able to dump things into appropriate spreadsheet sections made cleaning up the browser tabs easy as long as I put a little thought into how I want to organize and track things. Less browser tabs makes managing cognitive load very easy. For example, tracking job applications and their status is definitely a spreadsheet job. Tracking the time I spent on a freelance project is also a spreadsheet job. Tracking leads from former co-workers, dumping names of potential employers for later research, and so, all of these can all be spreadsheet jobs.

Two months ago, I would have never told you that a spreadsheet would be the axis on which I swing a large part of my day. If you are drowning in things you need to get done and are having a hard time clearing the space to execute, try a spreadsheet.