Breath deeply and consider that her actions and workflows are not your own. You are separate people and are both idiosyncratic. You cannot separate the parts, meaning that the annoying and beloved are both facets of the same person and that person is one you love and respect.

Thanks for your comment and the others as well. I understand this, sorry I seem to have phrased the question in a way that makes it seem about my frustration.

But it comes from a desire to help her be more organized in these little things. To make her day to day "lighter" and have less "to-do list" anxiety. It's not about some petty OCD self absorbed motivation =)

She has similar problems with her email (subscribes to too many mailing lists, and ends up feeling behind on everything), house chores (starts too many tasks at the same time and leaves them all halfway finished around the house).

I guess what I'm wondering is are there any writings (book, articles) that you could recommend to a person that has these traits?

thank you!

Better question: Why should you change your wife's browsing workflow?

I can't think of anything less consequential.

Well, you are right, there was other context that I left out and now added on a comment above.

Of course! Don't we all?

Doesn't all of that use a lot of ram? Why not remove some ram from her machine, wait until she complains it's so slow and then educate her, keep it that way for a few weeks and then put the ram back in.

Or alternately why not buy a few extra gigs of ram and upgrade her computer to more adequately meet her patterns of use.

We live a frugal life-style. There is one computer in the house for a family of 4 (couple + 6yo + 1yo). It's a 5 year old laptop running Win7 and 4Gigs of ram (with a slow conventional Hard-drive).

We will not upgrade or change this. But thanks for the suggestion.