Close Your Tabs! Reboot and Find Flow in a Noisy Mind

Hi there, Wisdom for Wannabes host Jackie Morreale here, to ask you a very simple question:

How many tabs open do you have on your browser right now?

How many tabs open do you have on your phone, of apps that you're using?

Simple question. For me, it was 23 on my browser and it was 12 on my phone.

It came up yesterday as a question from my child who was looking to find something on my phone and couldn't, because of all the noise that I kept open on my phone at all times. I literally have taught a colleague my method for crazy productivity with the 23 tabs open before and now I feel a little bit ashamed to have done that.

When we think about productivity, is it a matter of having 23 tabs open? Is it a matter of having five screens in front of us, which we are going to dissect information at the same time from? What I've learned is that productivity is something different.

If you want to be productive, try focusing on one thing.

That's where you're going to find your flow. (It is so difficult.)

If we think about our computers and what abuse we put them through with all these tabs open, all these programs running at the same time.

I do love my control C, control V. I did learn that in college from a professor who said your left hand has to be as productive as your right hand with the mouse and as your brain. That was a useful skill and I do use those copy paste shortcuts all the time.

But when we come to our computer... it's so bogged down with information that we wonder why sometimes the simplest solution for a health checkup for our computer is just to turn it on and restart it, right? Somehow that resets things.

If we think about our brain as a computer, how many things do we have going on in there?

How many apps do we have open in our own mind right now?

Is it 23? Is it 12? Is it two? Is it anything more than one?

How can you be present when you have so much noise open at the same time?

This is a question that I've really struggled with. I did not understand the feeling of flow and trying to create something. Trying to get into that state that's almost trance-like, where you can be completely creative and yourself and you just do. You've already been trained for this. You just do. You don't think. You just go with it.

You're in flow and it is present.

You see opportunities differently too when you turn down the noise.

If I think about my own brain and how to achieve this, it's a struggle. The struggle is real, especially in the marketing field where we have 23 tabs worth of social media and CMS for your website and PR for news that you want to release on a new product launch and all these different communication tools that we want to keep open at all times. If that important client emails us, we want to respond immediately. So we're checking our email. We're always present. We're always making ourselves present. But are we really present? Present by way of being able to do productive work, what we do best.

We're all bogged down with meetings. It's just meeting upon meeting upon meeting. So many of us are able to multitask during these meetings really well. But unless you're really present at the meeting, are you able to get anything from that meeting?

Whatever you're doing, if you have 23 tabs open, I invite you to be like your IT professional and say, please shut it down, reboot, start with the one thing, and see how far you can take that.

Something that helps me both as a marketing professional, as an entrepreneur, is I have a way of managing my projects. I have a lot of things going on in my head and I want to get them out. I want to keep it clear. One thing I've been able to use is a project management tool that I can take all the projects that I want to get done and put it in this tool.

​As soon as I take it out of my brain and put it into this tool, it's removed from what I'm thinking about so I can think about exactly that one ticket or that one list item or that one priority that I want to get done first, that's at the top of the list. Once you achieve whatever that goal was, that baby step towards a bigger goal, you're ticking off your list and throwing into your "done" pile rather than "work in progress", it is the best feeling in the world.

I invite you to think about what tabs are open on your phone, on your computer, in your mind, and closing them down.

The project management software that I use is free. There's plenty of options out there. I invite you to take everything, all the noise that's going on in your head and put it down somewhere else, whether it's a list or in a project management software, put it somewhere where it's no longer going through your head. This is the only tool that I've been able to use to become more productive and to find more time in my day for the things that I really wanted to do that I never found time for, for years and years.

I'm a creative person, I love to design, I love to draw. I didn't draw for myself for 15 years.

How did I reboot and figure out a time to do this when there's just no time, when you have a job and you have a family and you have a life?

How are you possibly finding time to do something as simple as draw for five minutes a day?

I drew for five minutes a day every single day last month. The way to do this was just to prioritize it. I had to make sure that this was on my to-do list, that I did just a little something every single day. Do you know the wonderful thing about changing your routine and doing something?

Is that it's something that I looked forward to and still look forward to doing every single day. It's me time every single day. And it's time when I'm in complete flow for those five, 10 minutes, where I find something that I can just sketch, for the fun of it. There's nothing else going on. I am not scrolling. I am not seeing what's on the news. I'm not worried about tomorrow. I'm just trying to capture the details of something sitting in front of me on paper.

It's different for everybody, so find your thing.

If you can't find the time for your flow, it's a problem for your productivity. So figure out how to get your productivity in order. Close those tabs. Put them into some other list so you don't have to think about them and be present so you can find that flow.

I have to say this book helped me, Atomic Habits, by James Clear. "Tiny changes, remarkable results", the subhead, captures it.

There are so many little ways that you can make changes. I identified mine as I just had way too many tabs open in my life.

Figure out which tabs need to close in order to open the new ones.

Have a wonderful day.

Spiral with Noise, J. Morreale, June 2025. Pastels on paper. See more sketches.

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Crystal ice patterns, R.G. Etienne. Learn more about the artist in our Tribute.

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