I Had 6 Side Projects Open in One Browser Window. Here's What That Was Costing Me.

I counted once, on a normal Tuesday. 41 tabs, one window, six different side projects. A repo here, a localhost there, a Stripe dashboard, two Notion pages, a half-read Stack Overflow thread I was scared to close.

I was using a tab manager to hold it all together. Save the session, restore it later, feel organized. It worked, in the sense that nothing got lost. But something was off, and it took me a while to name it.

The tab manager was keeping my tabs. It was not keeping my projects. And the gap between those two things was quietly costing me.

The number that bothered me

I did a rough audit of one week. Every time I sat down to work on a project, I had to reconstruct where I was. Which task was next? When was that thing due? Where did I save that reference last month? The tabs were there, but the answers were not in the tabs.

I timed it loosely. Five to ten minutes of "wait, where was I" at the start of every session, multiplied across six projects, multiplied across a week. Call it an hour, maybe more, spent just getting back to the surface before any real work started.

An hour a week is not a catastrophe. But it was an hour spent doing something a tool should do for me, and the friction was enough that I started avoiding the projects with the most tabs. The cost was not really the time. It was that the heaviest projects felt the worst to open, so I opened them least.

Why the tab manager could not fix this

Here is the thing I had to admit. A tab manager is excellent at one job: saving and restoring tabs. It is not built to know anything about the project those tabs belong to.

A tab is a URL. A project is a URL plus:

• A task that is due Friday


• A reference I saved three weeks ago and need again now


• A subscription renewing on the 14th


• A sense of what I actually shipped last time I worked on it

When all of that lives outside the tab manager, in a to-do app, a notes file, my memory, restoring the tabs only gets me halfway back. I still have to reassemble the rest by hand. That reassembly was the hidden cost.

What I tried first

Before I changed tools, I tried to patch it.

• 
  A master Notion page per project. Good for notes, useless for tabs. I still had to open everything manually, and the page itself became another tab.


• 
  Bookmark folders per project. One dimension only. A reference can be "design" and "billing project" and "read later" at once, and a folder forces it into one.


• 
  More disciplined session saving. This just made my tab manager tidier. It did not add the missing layers.

Every patch made the tabs cleaner. None of them made the project openable as a whole. I kept circling the same realization: I did not have a tab problem. I had a project problem that happened to show up as tabs.

The system that actually worked

What fixed it was treating the project as the container, with tabs as one thing it holds, not the main thing.

I moved my six projects into STACKFOLO, a Chrome extension that lives in the side panel and replaces the new tab. The shift was less about features and more about what "opening a project" means now.

For each project I set up:

• 
  A Quick Open preset. The repo, localhost, the deploy dashboard, the docs. One click opens all of them. This replaced the session-restore habit, but now the tabs belong to a named project instead of floating in a tab manager.


• 
  Tasks with deadlines. A small kanban board, plus a calendar view with due dates color coded. The "what was I doing" question now has an answer that is sitting right there.


• 
  Saved references. I hit Alt+Shift+S on any page and it gets read, tagged, and categorized automatically, then filed under the project. The reference I would have lost in a tab is now searchable a month later.


• 
  Subscriptions. The recurring cost per project, so the renewal on the 14th is not a surprise on my card.

The difference on Tuesday mornings was immediate. Instead of restoring 41 tabs and then spending ten minutes remembering, I open one project, click Quick Open, and the task list and references are already next to the tabs. The reassembly step is gone because nothing got disassembled.

What changed, concretely

Two things, mostly.

First, the start-of-session friction dropped to near zero. The tabs come back and so does the context, in the same place, at the same time. I stopped paying that hidden hour.

Second, and this surprised me more, I stopped avoiding the heavy projects. When opening a six-tab project costs the same as opening a one-tab project, the size stops being a deterrent. The two projects I had been quietly neglecting got attention again, purely because they were no longer annoying to open.

If you are doing the tab-manager-as-project-tracker thing

You probably already feel the gap I am describing. The tabs are safe but the projects feel scattered, and the reassembly tax is small enough that you have just absorbed it as normal.

You do not necessarily need STACKFOLO specifically. You need to notice that tabs and projects are different things, and that a tool for one will not solve the other. Pick whatever makes the project the container, where the tabs open alongside the tasks, the references, and the deadlines instead of in place of them.

For me that turned an hour-a-week tax and two neglected projects back into time and attention. The 41 tabs are still there when I need them. They just stopped being the only thing holding my projects together.

If you want to try the setup I landed on, STACKFOLO is free on the Chrome Web Store → https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/stackfolo/gakjkkjgbekgmdkijbgdpdmmhenjejpb?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=2026-06-w24-comparison&utm_content=blog-six-projects-cta-bottom