One thing I have a rather significant amount of is open tabs, specifically on my phone. At the time of writing this, I have 191 tabs open on my phone, plus a separate group of 11 tabs. I tend to use Safari on my phone as a way to keep track of things I want to look at later. I will often search for something that I want to do or read or watch at a later time with the intention of going back to the tab to do whatever it was. The issue is that I don’t go back to look at my tabs very often, so I keep adding new tabs without closing old ones, causing them to pile up.
I don’t know if this would be considered hoarding. I could argue that this isn’t a form of hoarding because they aren’t necessarily in a place they shouldn’t be, and they aren’t really causing any problems. An argument that this is a form of hoarding is that there is some amount of distress associated with getting rid of tabs. I hesitate to just close them all because they are things that, at one point, I deemed important or relevant, and they may still be useful to me, if not immediately, at least at some point in the future. And I do find myself going back to things often enough that I can’t justify closing them all.
The existence of this collection is at least somewhat due to a lack of a cleaning routine because I rarely take the time to go through all of them. I keep telling myself that I will go through and decide which tabs are relevant and which ones are not, but it has yet to happen on a large scale, although I have made several attempts to do this on a small scale. The existence of this collection could also be said to be the result of a cleaning routine, a cleaning of thoughts from my brain. As I said before, I will quickly search for something that I want to look for when I get a chance, as a way to get the thought out of my head and somewhere else.
Perhaps this will be the motivation I need to finally do it.
