5 Best Chrome Extensions to Increase Productivity

Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that can make the biggest difference. So in this article, we are looking at the 5 best Chrome Extensions for daily life which are very easy to use but can have a big impact on your day. Managing time is essential for anyone who wants to be successful. Unfortunately, many people struggle to search for useful chrome extensions, and this often leads to stress and anxiety.

That’s why it’s important to have tools at your disposal that can help you manage your time more effectively. We’ll explore some of the best Chrome Extensions available today. We’ll tell you which ones are the best for various types of people, and we’ll give you a brief overview of each app. Ready to start managing your time better? Let’s get started!

1. Pocket Extension

Pocket is all about clipping and grabbing pieces of information on the internet so that you can read it in a distraction-free environment. Let’s see how it works. On the web, if you have the Pocket extension available here in the top right-hand corner. So let’s say you would like to read this article, but it’s a 13-minute read.

But don’t have time for it right now. Instead, you can select the Pocket icon, and instantly it is saved to Pocket. If you like, you can add some tags or put them in a particular list. But let’s keep things simple for example. Let’s say you grab some article, which you would like to read through as well, but actually don’t have time. And also don’t want to be bogged down by all of the images as you go through the content. Once again, hit the Pocket icon and with one click it is added to the list. Lastly, Pocket also works for other content such as videos.

Once again, all you have to hit that Pocket icon and it is added to your list. Now, when you go back to Pocket and select the list, you can see both the article and video added to the list. The great thing is that it’s not just going to send me back to that web page. We get a reading-focused environment to do.

When you click on a saved web page, you can see that all of the advertisement is taken away. You can just focus on reading this article without all of the other distractions. If you select something like the YouTube video, you can watch it right here within the Pocket player. You are not distracted by other things, other advertisements, or perhaps other videos. You can just focus on the content that you want on Chrome Extensions.

2. Selectext Extension

The next tool on our list is also about gathering information, but information that is often hard to get at. How often have you been watching a video and perhaps someone has put up a large quantity of text and you’d like to take those notes to be used somewhere else, or just maybe for your own personal reference? Well, you could pause the video and take out a notepad or try and write it down in your note-taking app.

But with the select Text extension installed, you can see that there’s a new button in the top left-hand corner of the video. If you click the text, it will automatically find all of the text on the screen. Then click and drag and select just what want, and release, it is automatically copied to the clipboard. Then go into any other application and paste that information. Select Text is a free Chrome extensions and works on almost all video sites, including skillshare and even university lecture recordings.

3. Scribe Chrome Extensions

Now, speaking of learning new things, let’s see how we can create a user-friendly guide, either for ourselves or for others, so that we can remember how to perform certain tasks. And for that, we’re taking a look at the scribe. The way those scribe works is to record yourself doing those precise actions without changing a thing.

Scribe will record where you went, and what you did, and will even automatically zoom in and highlight where you clicked. The scribe is going to show how many steps are included in this guide and also how long it took for me to record it. You can either share a direct link to people to the scribe or export it to things such as PDF. If you upgrade to the Pro version, you can export to other formats as well.

4. IFTTT

Now the next service on our list has been around for a very long time but continues to evolve as it connects more services and allows you to create your own custom triggers. IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That allows you to create your own custom applets. What is an applet? Think of it as a recipe when you want things to do something specific and perhaps between two or more services. For example, from the dashboard, select the Create button. And here you can see the basic recipe which is waiting for inputs. If you want to be alerted of when things are snowing at a local ski resort. So select the Add button. Look for a weather service. Your search for either keywords or key apps and services.

Just type in Weather, and choose which is called Weather Underground. Now, under this service, you can see there’s a large number of different triggers which you can set up. Select tomorrow’s forecast calls to receive a notification when something specific is in the forecast for tomorrow, mainly what is the weather condition looking for, and at what specific location.

5. Limit

Let’s take a look at free Chrome Extensions that helps us with avoiding distractions. Limit is a free extension brought to us by freedom, which is all about trying to block out how much time we spend on particular sites. With the Limit extension installed, we have a very simple interface that we can use to easily either additional websites and also limit how much time we spend on those websites. Now, by default, you’re going to have a collection of roughly ten websites listed here and perhaps some common culprits such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are listed.

And by default, it’s going to give you a limit of 25 minutes. But you can customize this for each service. Maybe you want to allow 60 minutes on YouTube, but only want to give about 15 minutes on Instagram each day. If you want to add additional websites, you can just paste the URL. Lastly, if you want to see a visual indicator as to how much time I’ve spent on a website, you can toggle this switch at the top. But remember, whether you toggle this on or off, if the Limit extension is installed, it will block you from all of these sites after that limit has been reached.

If you have the show timer turned on in the top right-hand screen, it’s going to tell exactly how long have been on this site. And although you might find this distracting, it can be a helpful reminder that you don’t want to spend too much time on site. In fact, we really appreciate that it doesn’t show a second-by-second countdown. It only updates every 10 seconds. So it’s a little less distracting as you navigate around the site. Once your set limit is reached, that site will no longer be available to me until the next day.

Last update on 2025-02-16 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API