Lifehacker has spilled a lot of digital ink over the years trying to help you get your browser tab problem under control. How to use tabs more efficiently in Chrome . How to reopen your tabs after a browser crash . How to get an intervention for your tab addiction . How to save all your tabs before closing them . The best browser extensions to make opening a new tab better . But today I’m sharing a bold opinion that you might not like: you should just close all your tabs regularly, without studying them first. Just close them all.

I don’t say this lightly. I’ve been known to leave browser tabs open for weeks, even months, before I finally get through that long New Yorker read or add those best albums of the year to my Amazon Music queue. But with the expectation that I’d be getting a new work laptop today, I decided to do a little browser maintenance over the weekend, and after spending 10 minutes trying to deal with each tab before closing it, I finally just said “never mind” and closed them all… and felt instantly free. (Well, freer. Everything still sucks.)

Writers and psychologists have long pondered why we all have so many open browser tabs. According to Digital Information World , clinical psychologist Marc Hekster observed that computers and phones now serve as “extensions of our brains”; you can think of open tabs as your subconscious mind fiddling with something you don’t have time to devote your full attention to. Metro UK’s Ellen Scott likens the functionality to “task switching”; it allows us to move on to a new activity when we’re bored, but it also invites distraction. But at a time when I’m already particularly distracted—by the increasingly bizarre news cycle, increasingly intrusive social media, my increasingly demanding children who have been stuck at home for nine months—the last thing I need is more distraction. Those tabs lurking at the top of my browser bar not only make it harder to find the different windows I need, they actively encourage me to do something other than focus.

If tabs are bugging you too, or turning your browser into an unruly system-guzzling beast, simply close them all without looking at them. Do this at the end of each workday, or before you go to bed, or multiple times in between. If it turns out you really needed one of those tabs, there will still be a record of it in your browser history. For the rest, out of sight, out of mind.