Minutes Concerning Screen Share Cleanup
The tabs were closed before sharing began. The tabs are still open in a different window.
What Would Have Happened If the Person Had Simply Shared Their Screen Without Closing Any Tabs
The screen would have been shared. Fourteen tabs would have been visible in the tab bar. Three of the tabs would have been identifiable by title to attentive observers. One tab would have read "Salary benchmark 2022 IT India." Another would have read "Is it normal to feel tired after video calls." A third would have been a news article that was open since Tuesday and had not been read.
The meeting would have continued. The agenda item would have been discussed. The tabs would have been present throughout, visible, ignored by most participants, and noted by two.
Total elapsed time spent managing tab visibility: zero seconds.
What Actually Happened
The screen share prompt appeared. The person looked at the browser. The person did a rapid scan of visible tab titles. The scan identified four tabs requiring immediate closure and two requiring migration to a second window. The migration to the second window was completed in eleven seconds.
The second window now contains the salary benchmark tab and the news article. The second window is minimized but technically still open. If the share settings capture all windows rather than the selected window, both windows will be visible.
The person switches to the safer setting.
The Governing Rule
Meeting etiquette is valid whenever enough people copy a behavior before anyone names it. Nobody named this behavior. It arrived through repetition. Every person who cleans tabs before sharing their screen does so without being asked. Nobody has codified the practice. Nobody has questioned it. It is simply done now, on every call, by most participants, as a matter of course.
The Absurd Core
The call is meant to simplify coordination, yet everyone spends energy managing how participation looks. The twelve seconds spent on tab cleanup produced no benefit to the meeting. The meeting content was identical. The tabs were not discussed. The salary benchmark remained unseen. The question about video call fatigue remained private.
The cleanup happened because the norm exists, and the norm exists because the cleanup happens.
Consequence
Eventually screen share cleanup acquires an unwritten enforcement system that everyone denies creating. A colleague who once shared their screen without cleanup was described in a post-call message as "a bit much." Nobody elaborated. Nobody needed to.
The tab cleanup continues. Nobody is watching as carefully as the cleanup assumes.
Nobody is watching at all.