Top 10 Browser Extensions for Productivity
The Internet browsers we use on a daily basis such as Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, are all unique and well-designed to best serve their users.
Each browser option is loaded with wonderful features that give users satisfactory browsing experience, but that’s only the beginning.
Browser extensions are a great way to enhance the experience you have in your preferred browser.
Many extensions available are used to increase productivity and help you get things done in a quicker and more efficient manner.
Browser extensions are basically really useful and creative shortcuts that are available to download in your browser web store and most of them are free!
It’s easy to be overwhelmed when seeing all the extension choices you have available to you, so let’s pick out some of the ones that will be the most beneficial to your productivity.
1. Grammarly
This free writing assistant app is super helpful if you do a lot of writing or just want your writing to be as clear and effective as possible.
Download the app to your browser and begin inspecting your writing anywhere on the web for not only spelling but grammar errors.
You can even upgrade to a premium version of the extension and receive vocab suggestions, advanced sentence structure, and a plagiarism detector.
But, if you just want a consistent grammar and spell check addition to your Internet writing, Grammarly is the best option out there.
Along with a thorough grammar and spell check, each week, you will receive an email with you Grammarly insights report, detailing your weekly writing updates which include your productivity using the extension, your accuracy, your unique words vocab, and your top 3 mistake trends of the week, helping you improve.
2. Momentum
Sometimes all you need to stay productive is a good, positive mood boost and task reminder.
Momentum is the perfect extension for a simple and inspiring way to keep on track with your day.
Opening up a new tab is often boring and filled with pages you’ve previously visited or sometimes a search bar and only a search bar.
With the Momentum extension, you can open up a new tab and see the time of day, a personal greeting, a weather update, your “to-do” list, and even an inspirational quote, set to the backdrop of some relaxing scenery.
The pages are customizable, meaning you can update your to-do list as frequently as you need to and change up the way you want to be greeted.
3. Pocket
We’ve all come across those really interesting articles that we stop what we’re doing and begin to read, but we know we don’t have the time for it at the moment.
You still don’t want to miss out on some new, valuable knowledge, so you can use the Pocket extension to save that must-read article for later.
Now, you’re just one click away from getting right back into a good read.
You don’t have to lose productivity because you’re nervous about missing out on the latest news update or blog post from your favorite blogger.
With Pocket, you can stay focused on your current task and know that the article will be ready for you as soon as you’re done.
4. Strict Workflow
While the Internet is one of the greatest tools to use for accomplishing tasks on your list, it can also be an incredibly distracting place.
With Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and all the other fun websites to spent time on, you can find yourself moving further away from your priorities.
Strict Workflow is a browser extension that will help keep you away from those fun, yet distracting websites.
The app enforces up to a 25-minute no-nonsense workflow followed by a 5-minute break by letting you choose which sites to block out for those 25 minutes.
After 25 minutes of work-time is up, you’ll be rewarded with 5 minutes to visit those fun sites.
After 5 minutes, it’s back to work and the cycle begins all over again until you’ve finished your task.
5. Noisli
Working in an office with several coworkers comes with its challenges.
Everyone has their personal Spotify music playlist playing at a higher than acceptable volume, side conversations, and various office noises in the form of the printer, desk drawers, ringing phones, etc.
Sometimes we’re just not in the mood to welcome these noises around us as we commonly would.
A good solution to the drowning out the surrounding noises is the Noisli extension.
Noisli helps to block out surrounding annoying noises by replacing them with more relaxing and calm noises.
This extension lets you create your own space by playing background music perfect for centering your focus, such as the noises of waterfalls, a crackling fire, thunderstorms, etc.
Sometimes the atmosphere can make or break your focus and maybe throw you off a productive course.
Use Noisli to stay focused and ignore all the office background noise.
6. HoverCards
Coming across links to different websites, YouTube videos, articles, etc. is great and all, but sometimes when you click to open the link, the end result is unsatisfactory and the page may not load all the way, or you’ll begin to fill your browser with multiple open tabs.
To remedy this issue, download the HoverCards extension.
With HoverCards, all you have to do is simply hover over the link you want to open, and it will show you a mini-preview of what lies behind the link.
If it seems worth your time then, by all means, open that link.
If not, then you won’t have to spend the time or slow down your computer by opening another tab.
HoverCards work with all links, but really shows off when it comes to social links such as a Twitter account, showing you that person’s YouTube and Instagram accounts as well before you even have to visit them yourself.
7. Be Limitless
Time is a precious resource that we don’t want to see go to (too much) waste during the day.
The Be Limitless web extension is a great source for time tracking on the Internet.
A great way to stay productive is to have a visual gauge of where your time is going instead of where it really should be.
Be Limitless turns a new, open tab into a visually appealing dashboard displaying the amount of time you have spent on different sites during the day.
The extension also allows you to set up a to-do list, provides weekly and monthly productivity reports and analytics, and gives you access to your frequently used websites.
8. LastPass
Nothing puts a damper on productivity like a good ole’ hacked password, right?
Being safe online is step one in staying productive.
This involves having secure passwords to all of your login accounts online.
Having a password like 1234567 may not be the best choice.
But having a highly secure password like ynHFW#MKL$10i may be a bit tricky to remember.
The LastPass extension saves you the time and stress of figuring out a new password for all the online accounts you need to manage.
LastPass creates a different, unique, and strong password for each site and stores it locally in an encrypted vault, while automatically filling in login screen as needed.
All you have to do is remember one single master password for LastPass and the rest is set and secure.
9. Adblock Plus
Without a doubt, the most popular ad blocker is Adblock Plus.
We love the Internet, but we don’t love ads.
Even though they often serve a purpose, they can be annoying and really hinder our productivity when they get in the way.
The Adblock Plus extension is a great help with blocking ads.
Video ads, banners, pop-ups, etc., can all be blocked from the sites we visit.
Take control of your browser back and customize Adblock Plus to fight the ads you don’t want to hang around and the malware you don’t want to let in.
It’s used on over 100 million devices, this is the easiest-to-use ad blocker around.
10. Extensity
Now that you have all of these amazing and useful browser extensions, you may be a bit overwhelmed and feel disorganized with all of them hanging out in your toolbar.
With one final extension called Extensity, you can wrangle them all in one discrete place.
With Extensity, you can enable and disable your web extensions as you please.
This will also help your browser run a bit more smoothly as you don’t have to have all extensions running all the time.
2020 Favorites:
Taking notes on a laptop can be annoying having to constantly switch screens.
However, with Airtsory you can drag-and-drop web clipper/notes into an organizer right on the side panel fo your screen.
No more switching from the web to a Word document every time you want to jot down a note.
Not to mention the note will appear along with its source URL so citation is super easy.
This is similar to AdBlock Plus in the sense that it removes unnecessary items from a page besides the text.
Think about how many blog pages you visit that have popups to join their newsletter, attend a webinar, download an e-book or white paper, and so forth.
Just Read takes all that away, making it simpler to well just read (lol).