The Five Tab System: Armchair Method

A simple system to orient and motivate you during your next massive classic.

Maybe your browser often looks like mine. Standing in a single file phalanx, an army of innumerable of tabs demand my time and attention. As this dogpile of dogeared webpages grows, I can’t even read the titles of these pages or recall what they contain. Rifling through them, I find videos, articles, documentation, wish lists, shopping carts, dashboards, and blog editors. All these nagging reminders dissolve into an anxious haze of vague urgency, born from my excessive interests.

From this cacophony of bookmarks, a universal law emerges: the more tabs you have, the less meaning they carry, and the less happy you’ll be.

Given my history with browser windows, I cannot understand why people treat their books in the same way. Whenever I see Booktubers show off their copy of Infinite Jest or War & Peace, I see countless tabs haphazardly sticking out and feel the same anxiety described above. Naturally, many places in these long books merit revisiting. But to me, these books just look like they’re about to sneeze confetti.

Rather than using tabs for reviewing books, I use tabs for reading them. Instead of marking points of interest to revisit later, my tabs reinforce the structure of the book and the duration of my reading sessions. This minimalist approach aids both memory and motivation. So, if you have a large book you’re hoping to tackle in the New Year, consider trying out this Five Tab System.

Static Tabs: The Beginning & The End

No matter where are you are in a book, the beginning and end are always in the same place. For smaller books, the front and back cover mark the beginning and end clearly enough. But, whenever I set up a large book, I tend to place two Static Tabs which mark these the true beginning and end of the book. (In my copy of Anna Karenina used throughout this post, the Static Tabs happens to be the yellow ones.)

The Beginning Tab marks the actual start of a book. The pages before the beginning might contain the tablet of contents, introductions, author timelines, translator notes, or a dramatis personae. Occasionally, this information is useful while you’re reading. For example, in Russian novels, you might need to refer to the list of character names, laid out in their various forms. But more often, you’ll want to revisit this front matter after you’re done reading, or before embarking on a rereading.

Likewise, the Ending Tab marks the true end of the work. Beyond that tab, you find endnotes, appendices, glossaries, or the index. This tab makes it handy to grab the supplementary information quickly, without having to page through things too much. Again, you might dip in a few times while reading the book, but mostly you’ll explore that back matter only after the book demonstrates its worth going deeper.

For impatient readers (which is all of us at some point), that final tab keeps the end in sight. Since reading can be hard work, it’s good to know where the goal lies.

Many massive books can become much less formidable and more achievable once these two tabs chop off an extra hundred pages from the beginning and end.

Active Tabs: Starting, Section & Bookmark

Within the bounds of the two Static Tabs, I have two or three tabs of different colors that frame my reading sessions and longer sprints. These Active Tabs move their place based on my progress in the book. (In this example, they happen to be the blue tabs.) The two unique to this system are the Starting Tab and the Section Tab, but there is a third we all know.

This most important and most universal Active Tab is The Bookmark. All of us are familiar with this one. That little strip of paper hanging out of the book answers the question: where are we now? Since The Bookmark gets moved so often, most tabs would lose their adhesive before I was even finished with the book. Most of the time, this “tab” isn’t even a tab.

In library books, I tend to use a wide 4x6 note card to mark my spot; it’s also helpful for jotting down page numbers worth revisiting, quotes worth remembering, or other occasional notes. In personal “working copies”, where I’m using marginalia, I’ll typically just leave my pencil to hold my spot. But I always prefer to use a ribbon marker—because all good books should have ribbon markers. (In fact, I bought a spool for adding ribbon markers to hardcover volumes that lack them.)

In any case, the first Active Tab (that is actually a tab) is the Starting Tab. It marks the point where I started reading that day. Whenever I sit down for a reading session, I take the Starting Tab from where it was when I began my last reading, and move it up to where I’m starting today, i.e. where the Bookmark was last left.

As I move the Starting Tab to its new spot, I glance back over what I read last time, recalling what happened during my last reading session. Like how many television shows have an open recap sequence, I get a chance to put myself back in the flow of the argument in non-fiction or the flow of the narrative in fiction.

Marking where I began reading also helps with habit tracking. Everyday I note in my Reading Log 1. Which books I read, 2. Which pages I read, 3. How many pages I read, and 4. any keywords or notes from that day’s reading. With the Starting Tab holding that day’s starting page number, I can get up to make a cup of tea, take care of my child, or do any number of things, and I won’t have to hunt for that day’s starting point later.

While it might seem like obsessive to some, the simple habit of logging my reading sessions was the greatest thing I’ve done to improve my reading life. Carrying around this little book of synopses helps me revisit so many great ideas and scenes from my books. (For more, on how to use a Reading Log, check out this post featured below.)

The Starting Tab can help with confidence just as much with it can with recollection. It’s easy for impatient readers to glance forward at the hundreds of unread pages lying before them and succumb to despair. But when you see how many pages are piling up against the Starting Tab, you can get an empowering sense of your own industriousness—which can be especially helpful with the big books. All those pages demonstrate that you are successfully eating this elephant, one bite at a time.

Finally, every casual glance back at the Starting Tab triggers the same review reflex we use when we move the tab forward for a new session or look back to enter that session in our log. Its presence asks questions like: What where just talking about? What led up to this? How did this happen? How did we spend our day? These are all questions we should be in a habit of asking more often in our lives anyway.

The last Active Tab is the Section Tab. Some books are houses, containing many mansions. Some books are wars, containing many battles. This tab marks the end of the major section, within which you’re currently reading. Again, in a smaller book or a book that only has small sections, I might not even bother with this tab. But with larger books which have a definite structure, it’s proven very useful.

Depending on the architecture of the book, these sections could be called “chapters,” “parts,” or even “books.” In the case of Anna Karenina, all the chapters were only 3 to 10 pages long, so I only moved my blue Section Tab through the eight major parts, which were around 100 pages each. In Augustine’s Confessions , I’d probably place my tabs on its thirteen “books” (which are closer to our modern sense for “chapters”).

However an author choses to break up the work, my Section Tab tends to mark what would take a couple normal reading sessions to accomplish. Just as whole television series is broken into a several seasons and episodes within that, I approach my reading a book according to its major sections which contains a handful of sessions. Yet, just like a series, sometimes I have voracious evenings where I binge a whole section or two.

Glancing at the Section Tab, also has its psychological benefits. While the Starting Tab activates our memory, the Section Tab excites our sense of expectation and anticipation: what is going to happen? Looking at this tab makes me wonder makes this section a milestone. Asking these questions along the way makes me ready to find their answers. A bit of appetite helps you savor the meal better.

Upon reaching this rest stop, I often take a breath and look back over all the pages covered up to that point, reliving all the events and ideas encountered along the way. Moving this tab to the next section, I demarcate the next sprint of this relay race, the next leg of the journey. Maybe I’ll slide the Bookmark in, log my reading session, and set the book aside for the evening. Maybe I’ll refresh my glass of tea, and dive back in—driven by the wonder of what this new section has in store. If you’re new to large books, moving the goal post a bit closer really helps invigorate your reading energy.

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Five Tabs for Flow

When dealing with monumental, sprawling, complex books, the most important thing to do is to simplify. There’s something about doing things in fives that keeps them on a human scale. Knowing the beginning & end of the work defined by the author, the starting & stopping points defined by effort, and where I currently am—these are generally all I need when reading a great book. Personally, if I come across lyrical passages, remarkable quotes, or major turning points, I would scribble down a quick note rather than use tabs. But I’ve been surprised how my quick glances at the Five Tabs framing my reading tend to reinforce the structure of the book, thus making notes often unnecessary. Rather than focusing on individual lines in the book, the Five Tab System reminds you of your place within the whole—which ironically makes remembering the parts much easier. Staying in the flow of the book tends to help the book flow into me.

Give the Five Tab System a shot on your next big read and let me know how it goes.

Or feel free to…