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A few months into her new job as VP of marketing at RingBoost, the country’s largest provider of vanity phone numbers (think ‘1–800-GOT-JUNK’) Ellen Sluder found herself at a major telecom industry conference.

“We had partied really hard the night before, because it was in Vegas. And my boss was the only one who rallied to go to the final breakfast,” she told me.

“He started chatting with this random guy sitting next to him, who told him, ‘Hey, I have a vanity phone number. It’s ***-ASSHOLE.’ And my boss was like, ‘Oh my god… I’m ***-ASSHOLE.’”

“The guy thought he was lying, so he dialed it, and his phone rang. And they’ve been friends ever since.”

“It’s such a weird business.”

Sluder has gotten used to finding vanity phone number customers in places where she least expects to. So she looks for them anywhere and everywhere she can, from the moment she opens her email in the morning.

“I get AdWeek, GrowthHackers, Databox. Out Of Home Today [the leading out-of-home industry publication]. I get a lot of industry newsletters sent to me. And then I open all of them. But I can’t devote half of my day to reading stuff, because I have to do other things. So I keep it all open.”

Sluder’s desktop is usually overflowing with browser tabs — not just for Businessweek articles and newsletters about the roofing industry, but also all of the other things she needs to do her work: spreadsheets, social media, Google docs, etc.

“People make fun of me in the office. They’re like, you’re insane with all of the tabs you have open.”

This doesn’t faze her. Once a browser window is full of tabs, she’ll pull a tab out into its own window and begin the cycle anew.

“Well now I have LinkedIn open in five different windows [and] it’s one of 70 tabs I have open. And then if someone messages me on LinkedIn and I hear the little ‘plink,’ I’m like, ‘Where is it? Where’s the plink??”

This is Sluder’s day-to-day: an endless sea of plinking web browser tabs. They’ve taken over her life to the extent that she can’t remember what she did before them, and can’t imagine working without them.

“I don’t know what I would do. I don’t really remember. It’s just such a part of what I do.”

Sound familiar? Then like Sluder, you might be a tab hoarder.

What is ‘tab hoarding’?

There’s no clear cut definition of tab hoarding. Some people say having 10 Google Chrome tabs open at a time is “hoarding,” but we’ve also seen people with 500+ open. In the same way that no two messy desks are the same, no two tab hoards are alike.

It isn’t some rare condition either. When I put out a call for “tab hoarders” earlier this month through HARO, a popular feedback site for journalists, dozens of people reached out within a few hours.

“Between ad platforms, social media accounts, marketing tools and everything else, I constantly have way too many tabs open,” Devin Olsen, a marketer from Utah, told us. “A quick tally reveals that I currently have 105 open.”

“Why, why, why do I do it? I guess it’s just habit?” said an exasperated Sherry Gavanditti, a Cleveland-based communications specialist.

“Hello, Yes. I already dream of these tabs,” said Max Babych, a startup founder from Kiev.

I heard from PR professionals, museum curators, paramedics, journalists and even movie directors. Many of these people reported slowed down computers, crashing web browsers, lost work and decimated attention spans, all of which they blamed on their tab hoards.

Worst of all, most of these people blamed themselves for their tab hoarding. Which is unusual, because it’s not entirely clear what causes it, beyond having an internet connection.

Far from being some weird thing that people occasionally do, it seemed like everyone was becoming a tab hoarder. At that tab hoarding was making all of us miserable.