My Squirrel Buries Way More Than She'll Ever Dig Up, and It Explained My 60 Open Tabs

There’s a grey squirrel who’s claimed the maple outside my kitchen window, and every October she runs the same routine: dig a small hole, drop in an acorn, pat the dirt back down, move eight feet, repeat. She does this dozens of times a day for weeks. I used to assume this was just a very thorough pantry — a single, findable stash she’d work through all winter. It isn’t. She’s a scatter-hoarder, which means the food isn’t in one place, it’s spread across the whole yard in hundreds of tiny, separate caches, and she will not get back to most of them. Some she’ll forget outright. Some are functionally insurance for a winter that might be worse than expected, buried on the off chance she needs them and never touched again if she doesn’t. A meaningful share just sit there until spring, when the ones nobody dug up quietly turn into oak seedlings.

I only really understood why this bothered me when I counted my own browser tabs one afternoon and got to sixty-one.

The burying was never really about the acorn

Here’s the thing that reframed it for me: a squirrel scatter-hoarding isn’t behaving inefficiently. From her perspective, burying more than she needs is the strategy — a single winter stash is a single point of failure if another animal finds it or she forgets the spot, so spreading the risk across hundreds of small, mostly-unneeded caches is a genuinely sound way to make sure some of them are there when she needs them. The acorn she’ll never retrieve isn’t wasted effort. It’s the cost of a system built around “just in case,” and that cost is paid whether or not the acorn ever gets eaten.

A browser tab held open “for later” is doing the same job. The article you meant to finish, the product page you were comparing, the thread you didn’t want to lose, the reference you might need again — none of it is exactly needed right now, and most of it, if you’re honest, is closer to insurance than to an active task. I don’t open sixty-one tabs because I have sixty-one things to do this afternoon. I open them the way the squirrel buries acorns: against a future where I might want one of them, spread out because closing any single one feels like a small, specific risk of losing something.

The cost isn’t the tab you forgot about — it’s the ones still in view

The part of the squirrel’s strategy that doesn’t map cleanly onto a laptop is what a cache actually costs her while it’s sitting there, buried and out of sight: essentially nothing. A tab is a much worse deal, because it never actually leaves your visual field. It sits in the tab bar, in view, every single time you glance at the browser, whether or not you’re thinking about it.

That distinction matters because of what’s known as cognitive load — a concept from educational psychologist John Sweller’s research on how working memory handles competing information, going back to a widely cited 1988 paper on problem-solving and learning. Working memory has a genuinely small capacity, and every additional item competing for a share of it — including things you’re not actively using, just aware of — takes a small toll on how much is left for whatever you’re actually trying to think about. A related line of neuroscience research, out of Princeton, found that visual clutter in a scene competes directly for processing capacity in the brain’s visual cortex; more competing objects in view measurably degrades how well any one of them gets processed. A tab bar with sixty items in it isn’t neutral background. It’s sixty small, constant claims on a resource that was never designed to hold that many things at once, whether or not you click on a single one of them today.

A cached acorn costs the squirrel nothing while it’s buried. A browser tab never actually gets buried — it sits in view, making a small claim on your attention, every time you glance at the bar.

Why more open options make it harder to pick one, not easier

There’s a second piece of research worth naming, because it explains why a wall of tabs doesn’t just cost attention, it actively makes deciding what to do next harder. Psychologist Barry Schwartz’s work on what he called the paradox of choice found that beyond a fairly low threshold, additional options don’t make people more satisfied with their eventual choice — they make the choosing itself more effortful, and the outcome, once picked, feel less satisfying, because there were more roads not taken to second-guess. Sixty-one tabs isn’t sixty-one tasks. It’s sixty-one competing “maybe start here” options, every one of them a small argument against whichever one you actually pick.

This is a different mechanism from the one behind an unread notification badge. We’ve written before about the Zeigarnik effect — the way an unfinished task creates a small, nagging open loop in your head until it’s resolved. A stack of tabs produces some of that same feeling, but the deeper cost here isn’t the nagging, it’s the sheer number of live options sitting in front of you every time you try to choose what to work on next. Closing tabs doesn’t just quiet a nagging feeling. It shrinks the menu you’re re-reading every single time you look up.

A cache you’ll actually dig back up

The squirrel’s system works, in its way, precisely because she doesn’t need every cache to survive the winter — she needs enough of them to. Applied to sixty-one tabs, that’s a more useful goal than “read everything eventually”:

• Sort by insurance versus task, honestly. A tab you’re actively working from is a task. A tab you’re keeping “just in case” is insurance, and insurance belongs somewhere other than your peripheral vision.
• Give the insurance tabs an actual burial spot. A reading-list app, a bookmarks folder, a single running note — anywhere that gets them out of the tab bar without pretending you’ll never want them again. The squirrel still buries; she just doesn’t leave the acorns sitting on top of the dirt.
• Cap the number you’ll let sit in view at once, the same way a fixed time budget beats trusting your own sense of “enough” — a personal ceiling of ten or fifteen active tabs forces the sorting decision instead of deferring it indefinitely.
• Close on a schedule, not on guilt. A weekly five-minute pass — keep, archive, or close — treats the pile as maintenance rather than a referendum on how behind you are.
• Notice which sites keep respawning tabs. If the same two or three domains account for most of the sprawl, the actual fix is usually further upstream than closing today’s instance of the tab.

She’ll never dig up most of it, and that’s fine

Not every acorn my squirrel buries needs to get eaten for the system to have worked — some of it is doing its job just by existing as a backup she probably won’t need. The problem was never that she buries too much. It’s that a laptop, unlike a backyard, doesn’t let anything actually go out of sight once it’s stashed. Every tab I’ve left open for “just in case” is still right there in the bar, a little visible claim on my attention, whether or not I ever go back for it. I haven’t stopped opening tabs I might not finish. I’ve just started actually burying the ones I’m not using today, instead of leaving all sixty-one of them sitting on top of the dirt where some part of my brain has to keep counting them.