It’s my birthday today, November 13th. No. I wasn’t born on a Friday either.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I do residential and commercial painting, during my many leisurely hours. Monday, which was an off day for us, was spent putting in a few hours painting some new Ready to Move homes that are being built in town. This new business venture has been a boom for our small community but, like in many areas, trades people have been hard to find so I’ve been enlisted to do help.

When I’m painting, I have quite a few hours to think about things of all sorts. It’s during this time that I contemplate how our School Improvement might look over the next few years or how our Code of Conduct will develop. I think about how we might engage a few of our students that are not interested or what we, as a community, can do for our youth. Today, during one of my less than deep moments, I thought about how the average person uses the browser and, on average, how many tabs they have open at any one time. (Hey, it was a long day;)

Now, I’ve found that I usually have about 10 tabs going at the same time as I keep tabs (ha ha ha) on various things. I have ClaimID, Pageflakes, iGoogle, school inbox, twitter, staff wiki, blog, admin wiki, planning wiki, class wiki and usually a news site open. Now, if someone has a twitter about a particular URL, I might check it out so the tabs could pile up. I do use delicious but I’m not very good at looking there. I’ve begun to reduce the number of tabs I keep open since it sometimes makes the browser become unresponsive when I awaken the laptop.

I also find that with my use of more online apps like Google docs, calendar and such, I have more tabs open as I add things to various places.

What’s your tab count? Do you find yourself with multiple tabs open at the same time? How do you track your tab use? Has it grown with the more online apps that you use?