Trying to get work done when you’re at your PC can sometimes be a lot of work and take much longer than you had expected, especially when you’re constantly checking Twitter or watching videos on YouTube, and it’s not because you have a lot of work, you just can’t help but distract yourself.
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Or in other words, you’re sitting their procrastinating and putting your work off until the last minute, whether it’s homework or something for work. So it that’s the case then you need to look not further if you’re looking for some handy tools to keep you on track when you work, because we’ve picked our five favorite Google Chrome extensions that will help you become more productive.
RescueTime
The RescueTime Dashboard developers have a new extension, called RescueTime, which will track the applications and websites you spend they most time on so you can see how long you’ve been spending you time,which is mostly filled with us endlessly scrolling through Twitter. But RescueTime hopes to give you constant feedback that you can use to re plan your day so you can get stuff done a lot quicker, which in reality will leave you more hours of the day to do what you want. It will also help you stop feeling guilty about that work you should of completed 3 days ago when you a free night. RescueTime ranks your productivity with particular sites, it will block distracting sites which you’re spending too much time on, and if you an Android smartphone, you can track your time spent on the phones app. It also includes a useful feature which will let you set reminders if you get distracted, it will tell you so you can get back to working. You can also get a more advanced version of which costs $6 to $9 a month.
StayFocusd
Well we’ve already figured out that if you’re reading this then you must be addicted to Twitter, Facebook or YouTube and their all distracting you when you want to get work done. So if you spend your time switching from your work window to your play window then you’ll want to check out StayFocusd. Just like your parents might, StayFocusd limits the amount of time you can spend on certain sites which are most likely going to ruin your efficiency. So once you’ve reached your time limit on that particular sight, then you’re blocked from accessing it for however you set it too. And you can customise it as much as you want, from blocking any site you wish, certain pages of a site and how long you want to be blocked for. So I suggest you block Twitter and YouTube straight away.
Session Manager
Session Manager is a helpful extension that will help you manage your collection of tabs in many ways. Everyone knows that bookmarking a page can help, but unless your fond of having a bunch of bookmarks cluttering up your screen, then you’ll be happy to know that Session Manager can help. All you have to do is simply open all the tabs that you want for a specific session, so for example if you’re researching something you may want all the pages with notes that you’re going to copy down bookmarked, and you can also save them for future sessions as well. There’s even a ‘Save as temp session’ feature where you can save the tabs to be opened later and and when they’ve been opened those tabs will not save any more.
FastestChrome
FastestChrome is probably one of the most popular extensions for productivity and it does exactly what it says, it saves you time. You are able to search faster, get quick definitions of words simply by highlighting it and determine how popular a link is on either Facebook or Twitter. It will load next to the page for you just before you reach the end so there no extra energy required luckily. FastestChrome will also show you the price comparison when you’re shopping on sites like Amazon in real time which is really cool and the extension will automatically turn text URL’s into links and lets you select text, then select a search engine so you can search more selectively. All of its features are customisable and its also available on Firefox. Like I said, FastestChrome is the most popular extension for productivity, and the already one million users agree.
Strict Pomodoro
If you’re the kind of person who works well under pressure and to time limits then Strict Pomodoro is the extension for you. Every 25 minutes a timer will go off which in that time will allow you to take a 5 minute break where you can browse any site you wish, and when that times up, all those sites are blocked for another 25 minutes. This method is very good at helping you avoid a burnout when doing too much work at once but it also keeps you off your favourite sites with the promise of 5 minute browsing if you get your work done. It will help keep you motivated and stay on task knowing that 5 minutes is coming up soon, the extension also allows you to compile a list of sites you’re allowed to visit during that 25 minutes and if you visit a site not on that list then you’ll be blocked from accessing those distracting sites.
