I’m a web browser power user: in a single day, I have to switch between about 12 different modes of browser usage across 4 or 5 contexts of usage. Specifically:
- For my life insurance business, I have about 6 different modes of browser usage in a day:
- attending 3-way presentations with my trainer, which involves the 2 sub-tasks of booking new appointments and taking notes as he presents
- studying to certify as a trainer
- marketing my business in a new craigslist ad
- interviewing new respondees to my craigslist ad
- prospect on facebook for new talent
- prospect on linkedin for new talent
- For my wellness business I have to:
- audition new audio tracks for healing sessions
- update the website look and feel
- manage new affiliates for the website
- look into billing issues for the website
- For my personal life I have to
- pay personal bills
- play video games
- engage in social networking
- and much more
Now I have tried a lot of tab and work managers for browsers previously:
- Tabs Outliner
- [BrainTool]
- Windows Workspaces
- Workona with MS Edge tab groups I thought was my last stop but tab groups did not always preserve and Workona does not allow nested sections
- Arc Browser – when I learned that profiles were not a container for spaces, I .. I… never mind.
- Raindrop
- LinkMap – nice project but none of the windows are labelled with what I am doing
- tabOS – brilliant project. But I always found myself wondering what context I was in: with Workona you always have the birds-eye view of what project you are working on but then you dont see the tree structure of your navigation activity… which led me to…
- Tab Nodes Tree
- LinkMap
- Toby
but none of them really gave me the control of two things:
- knowing which task I was working on
- limiting the number of tabs to what I was currently working on
- effortlessly switching between tasks, regardless of whether it was a sub-task of my current task or a completely different thing
- pinning frequently used tabs
But then I found sidekick
Sidekick finally allows me complete control of a full day of power usage. I’m on my web browser 6 to 8 hours per day (YES I AM A NERD) and i was tearing my hair out trying to handle all the control I needed.
But let’s show how Sidekick fills my needs… full disclosure: both Shift, Ghost Browser and Wavebox have similar ideas. But until something about Sidekick puts a hitch in my workflow, I’m good to go.
With Sidekick, I know which task I am working on
In this screenshot, it is clear that I am working on “CFT” Training:
As a bonus, whenever you switch to what Sidekick calls a “session”, all other tabs vanish.
This is something that is manual in Toby: you have to click the right icon for it to work. And even though Workona and Arc allow something similar, neither worked for me as well each day. Arc has this amazingly STUPID feature of different profiles can be in the same workspace even though profiles should serve as the containers for a set of workspaces just as Organizations serve as a container in Toby.
I can switch between tasks effortlessly
if a call comes in and I need to jump from my wellness business to insurance OR if I need to do a different thing in my wellness business, EITHER thing can be done without much ado. And yes, in a day, I do find the need to wear 8 million hats and jump between them like Jack was nimble over the candlestick.
Pinned tabs genius
The pinned tabs are easy to click on in Sidekick. Arc, had a small set of tabs that were hard to read and click on. Just prior to finding Sidekick (after a 12 hour frantic run of downloading stackingly, tabos, tab nodes tree and more), I was using TabOS, which is a beautiful project with a MacOS-like dock… but TabOS failed to give me the ability to quickly context switch between things:
On top of all this, Sidekick seamlessly hibernates my pinned tabs and other tabs.
Sidekick is proof there is a god
I would’ve found sidekick earlier if it were a chrome plugin because I have tried EVERY tab manager in chrome… OneTab, TabExtend … dont get me started. and I dont know how the heck I found sidekick, but it is damn near perfect. Yes there are some rough edges, but that represents 1% of my weekly user experience instead of 50% of my daily experience like everything else I tried before.