I do this every year around now, usually after the relatives have gone home and before I have to pretend to care about work again on the 2nd. I go through my browser tabs. This year it took two nights instead of one, which either means I had a busier 2025 than usual or I've gotten worse at closing things. Probably both.
The count when I started was 187 tabs across four windows on my laptop, plus another 40-ish on my phone that I don't think I've looked at since maybe August. There's a tab from a plumbing supply site that I opened in March for a part I already bought elsewhere. There's four different tabs comparing mechanical keyboard switches, none of which resulted in me buying a keyboard, because I already own six mechanical keyboards and my wife has made it clear a seventh needs a very good reason. There wasn't one. I closed those.
What I actually want to write about is what this process tells you about a year, if you let it. Tabs are basically a low-effort diary. You don't decide to keep them as a record, they just accumulate, and then in late December you get this weird archaeological dig through your own attention span. I found a tab open to a GitHub issue I was clearly annoyed about back in June (closed, unresolved, I have chosen peace). I found three separate Wikipedia tabs on unrelated 19th century shipwrecks, which tells you exactly how one specific Tuesday night went. I found a half-written draft in this very blog's editor, dated October 14th, about a NAS migration I never finished writing up because the migration itself took four tries and by the time it worked I'd lost the will to document it. Maybe I'll finish that one before the year's actually out. Maybe not.
The other thing I do this time of year, less consistently, is go back through old December posts on here. This blog turned 14 in November, which is a strange number to sit with. Fourteen years of me typing into this same little corner of the internet, through three different blog engines, two domain scares, and one extremely dumb period around 2016 where I tried to make everything a podcast instead. The December 2011 posts are almost unreadable now, not because the writing is bad exactly (it is a little bad) but because the concerns are so of their moment. I was worried about things that turned out to not matter and completely missed things that turned out to matter a lot. I don't think that's a personal failing, I think that's just what writing in real time does to you. You can't see around the corner because nobody can.
Anyway. My actual tab-closing method, since apparently I have one: I sort by domain first, not by topic. That way you catch the stuff you meant to read once and then reflexively kept reopening as "read later," which is a lie we all tell ourselves. Anything from a news site older than about ten days gets closed without mercy, because if it mattered I'd have heard about it by now some other way. Anything that's a shopping page for something under maybe thirty dollars gets closed too, on the theory that if I actually needed it I'd have bought it already instead of staring at it for nine months. The stuff that survives this process, usually under twenty tabs by the end, is the stuff worth actually bookmarking properly, which I then promptly also never look at, but at least it's organized clutter instead of chaotic clutter.
I ended the second night at 14 tabs. Four of them are recipe pages for a soup my mother-in-law makes that I keep meaning to attempt and keep not attempting, mostly because it needs a specific dried chile I've only ever found at one store forty minutes away. Two are that half-finished NAS post. The rest are genuinely things I'm still using, a couple of docs pages for a script I'm maintaining, one map link for a hiking trail I want to do before it gets too cold to bother.
If you've never done this, the browser-tab autopsy, I'd actually recommend it over whatever more formal "year in review" thing you might otherwise attempt. It's more honest. Nobody curates their open tabs for an audience.