The Problem Was Never How Many Tabs You Have Open

Somebody is always telling you to close your tabs. Forty-three of them, a browser that sounds like it's wheezing, and a little voice saying this is why you can't finish anything. But that voice is aimed at the wrong target. Those tabs are the only place your brain has had to put things down.

Your tab bar is doing a real job

Russell Barkley, one of the most-cited researchers on ADHD executive function, has spent decades arguing that working memory — the ability to hold information in mind while you use it — is one of the places the ADHD brain runs thin. His model calls for externalizing: moving information out of your head and into the physical world, right where you'll need it again, instead of trusting your brain to hold it for you.

A browser tab is externalizing. So is the half-written email you left open, the PDF you'll "definitely read later," the three shopping tabs for a decision you haven't made yet. All of it is a memory system, built from the only material you had sitting in front of you at the time, because your actual working memory was never going to hold "come back to this" for free.

That reframe matters more than it sounds like it should. Shame just piles guilt on top of forty tabs you were already avoiding, and guilt has never once closed a tab. A system you built on purpose, you can actually improve.

The RMIT tab-switching study

A small 2025 proof-of-concept study out of RMIT University, run with the ADHD-tools company Focus Bear and published through Qatar's Mada Center, tried something more specific than counting tabs: it watched how people used them. Six participants worked through short, deliberately focused and deliberately distracted sessions while researchers logged tab count, how fast people switched between tabs, how long a tab sat idle, and whether the active tab actually matched the task at hand.

It's a tiny sample — six people, short sessions — and the authors call it early, proof-of-concept work, nothing to build a diagnosis on. The pattern still held. Idle stretches lined up with disengagement. Switching turned out to matter more: fast, frequent jumps between unrelated tabs tracked with attention that had already wandered off, and a model trained on nothing but these ordinary usage signals still predicted the person's actual attention state with real accuracy.

ADHD researchers have measured something similar for years in plain task-switching studies: the slowdown shows up when a switch forces you to re-aim attention at completely different information. Forty quiet tabs sitting there as reference material is one kind of event. Bouncing rapid-fire between six unrelated ones is another kind entirely.

Is switching itself the real cost?

There's a real cost to switching itself, tab-related or not, even once you've spotted the pattern. Gloria Mark's widely cited 2008 study tracking real office workers found it took an average of 23 minutes to fully return to a task after an interruption, even a short one, and that people picked up roughly two other tasks in between before they got back. Her follow-up work found something ADHD readers will recognize without needing a citation: constant interruption shows up less as lost minutes and more as reported stress, frustration, and effort by the time the work actually gets finished.

Picture what that looks like on an ordinary Tuesday: you open one tab to check a fact, land on three related headlines, and twenty minutes later you're reading about something that has nothing to do with the task you started. The 23 minutes Gloria Mark measured just showed up, right on schedule, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

Rapid, task-mismatched switching is the expensive part of this whole system. The RMIT researchers could see it from the outside, in raw usage data, before the person switching even noticed their own attention had slipped.

One thing to actually try

Stop treating your tab count as the metric that matters. Give yourself two kinds of tabs on purpose instead. Reference tabs are the ones you're deliberately holding onto, the externalized memory Barkley's model says you're entitled to use. Put them in their own browser window and don't feel obligated to close it for weeks — that's where last month's research tabs, the recipe you'll make eventually, and the insurance PDF all get to live without guilt. Active-work tabs need guarding. Three or four unrelated ones inside a couple of minutes is the exact signal the RMIT study measured, and it's a cue, not evidence against you. Use it to name what you actually meant to be doing before you pick anything back up.

Next time the guilt about forty open tabs creeps in, watch your switching speed instead of your tab count.

This is general information, not medical advice. If you're working through ADHD symptoms or considering any changes to your routine or treatment, that's a conversation for you and a qualified professional.

References

• Nagel, J., Widanagamage, V., Shivashankar, L., Basu, S., Anand, S., Manohar, M., Raju, C.S., & Pham, L. (2025). Too Many Tabs Open? Using Everyday Computer Data to Support Focus for Adults with ADHD. Nafath, Mada Center Qatar. https://nafath.mada.org.qa/nafath-article/mcn2903/
• Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. CHI '08 Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072
• Barkley, R.A. Executive Functioning, Self-Regulation, and ADHD. https://cba-va.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/ADHD-Self-Regulation-and-Executive-Functioning-Russell-A.-Barkley-Ph.D..pdf