Digital and Disorganized: Making Digital Work Make Sense

With more and more of our work becoming digital, it is getting harder for teachers to organize themselves in a world that is no longer physical. For teachers, this shows up across lesson plans, resources, communication, and the dozens of tabs open during any given school day.

Guides, lessons, collaboration, and production used to be tangible, relational, and shared. Now they live across tabs, windows, and tools, and the resources we need get lost in what I call “Tab World.” And it’s a dreadful place.

Many of us spend time every day trying to figure out which browser window has the tab we need to complete a task, gain insight, or move work forward. I keep telling myself, “I’ll find the tab eventually,” but I never do. I just open another window and add to the chaos.

It’s a problem I deal with, and I have a feeling many of you do as well, neurodivergent or not. We have gone two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world.

I have tried workarounds. I take a lot of notes, which, if I’m honest, are hard to read. I switch back and forth between notes and my computer. I save and bookmark websites to come back to later, but that list is now a mile long, and I avoid opening it because it has become another failed attempt at organization.

So what actually helps?

Yesterday I came across a browser tool that allows you to organize your tabs and windows by category, whether that is internal communication, client work, or current projects. You can structure it however you need, and I have intentionally kept mine simple.

Seeing clean thumbnails of what I actually need, instead of digging through endless tabs, has been a noticeable shift. It has meant less friction, less searching, and more clarity in how I move through my work.

The tool is called Toby. It is a free Chrome plugin.

The jury is still out, but so far it is one of the few things that feels like it is designed for how I actually work, not just how systems are organized.

There is a paid version, but I am not there yet. The free version does quite a bit.

If you are living in tab chaos and using the “I’ll find the tab eventually” method, only to never find the tab, it might be worth trying.