Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?

> My manager had a game-changing suggestion, too: give phonetool icons for people who submit to the list

What’s a phonetool icon?

Now each team has their own dashboard. E.g support team shows a graph of open/assigned/outstanding tickets, with SLA breaches highlighted. Sales team shows a sum up of data anomalies in their CRM (missing data, inconsistent states).

The rationale is that anything that shows up in red needs immediate action from a human being to avoid blocking the team, and we strive for the right balance between always green and always red (which are both useless states).

If you were to tell me to use bookmarks instead of tabs, I'd find that weird: Bookmarks are like a less useful version of tabs. I used to use Bookmarks and found them less useful; it's that simple.

Yes, I do use a plugin that allows better tab management, thanks.

With regard to digging through backups: Bookmarks would have exactly the same problem if they got wiped, would they not.

UPDATE: I'm with jml7c5's comment: There is a middle ground betweem traditional Bookmark use (archived) and live (current issues). My open tabs occupy this middle ground as a kind of medium-term, time-ordered backlog of issues to take another look through when time permits.

Some of them are articles containing information I want to extract to notes, some of them contain specific technical bugs, solutions or discoveries I need to incorporate having found out about them, and generally many serve as useful reminders about some issue or other to get to in due course.

The ability to visually see their time and association structure that grew passively is quite useful, as is the ability to visually see the actual content at a glance, because that helps me remember why that content is in my queue.

Bookmarks are almost useless for this. The URL is not enough by far. If Bookmarks had large thumbnails, retained scroll position, and it was possible to highlight particular text, then Bookmarks would be much more useful for my needs.

No doubt there are various clipping tools such as Evernote that would serve me better. But I haven't found an open source one that hits the spot, and I'm not interested in using any closed source or cloud-based clipping tool, having been bitten by locked away formats, and inability to extend the tool, too many times already.

I think your comment touches on the essential thing here, which is that web pages have the characteristics of tools, but also of tasks. Browsers are good at the tools part but don’t do anything for the tasks part.

I think trying to get the browser to handle the task component for you is the wrong answer. You can only do things that are equivalent to leaving the hammer by the door to remember to buy nails, and this scales terribly.

For all the concerns the many-tabbers have about “losing their place” they seem to be just always sort of lost. I can’t imagine the commenter above with thousands of tabs has everything he needs at his fingertips, and nothing he doesn’t.

My life has been easier since separating the tool and the task. Tasks go in my task manager (Todoist), and I put links to the relevant site if there is one. My toolbar has frequently visited sites with just their icons. My bookmarks folder is just a list of things I might be happy to run into someday. It would be no big loss if it was deleted. And last week I wrote a script for those pages that I just have to revisit, like an article I know I should read ten more times. It automatically creates a task in Todoist at increasing intervals (week, month, 3 months, 6 months, year) to reread X, with a link.