Hacker News Reader

I always have at least that many too. Not for real-time monitoring, just a large number of projects and threads of thought, many of which last for weeks or months. I do this for everything: I just totalled up all my currently open terminals, browser tabs, documents, etc., and got to over 700, and it's only that low because I've restarted a couple of times recently....

View on HN

If I had that many I'd never actually finish anything.

I suffer from the same problem of too many terminal windows and browser tabs, and honestly it doesn't seem to help me much. It just dilutes my attention. I always do a logoff or restart at the end of every day now, and that seems to help a fair bit.

To keep track of what I need to do in the short term, I have a simple TODO text file.

Unrelated, but if you're using plain old text files for todo lists, you should look at this: http://todotxt.com/

Or the Org Mode of Emacs

Me too! I've been using a plain TODO.txt for years, it's amazingly efficient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com