Save Time & Increase Productivity With These 5 Awesome Extensions [Chrome]

Save Time & Increase Productivity With These 5 Awesome Extensions [Chrome]:

Increased productivity is hard to appreciate until we attain it. The average person wastes lots of time each day typing the same word, switching between confusing tabs, not to mention drowning in an overwhelming amount of tabs they can never make sense of. This happens to all of us at least some of the time. But there are actually some easy solutions.

Browser extensions are a quick and simple way to increase productivity quickly. Installation is a breeze, configuration takes minutes, and the time and energy it can save you is invaluable. The only thing that does take time is finding really good and simple extensions that do this. Here is a list of some excellent yet simple Chrome extensions that WILL increase your productivity.

Decreased Productivity

Despite its name, Decreased Productivity can actually help you increase it. With Decreased Productivity, you can control what you want to see on a page, and do so in a tab-specific way. Want a certain website to always cloak images, hide flash, and appear with pink text on blue background? No problem.

There are numerous other things you can control. From hiding titles and favicons, to changing fonts and changing image opacity. You can also have the settings toggle with a hotkey, and create a blacklist and whitelist for your settings.

As for colors, you can create your own color scheme or choose from a list of presets. You can change the background, text, links, and table borders. There’s a handy little demo area below these settings so you can immediately see what it looks like.

The only thing I couldn’t find is a way to create several different settings for different lists of websites, but even so, Decreased Productivity is a useful little extension that can definitely increase your productivity.

Dossier

How many times have you found yourself with 30 some-odd tabs open at the end of the day, all of which you opened for a reason, but now you don’t have the time or energy to look them all? How do you go about saving so many open tabs in a way that doesn’t create a huge mess? Dossier is one excellent way.

Dossier lets you bundle tabs into handy dandy lists, which you can access later, when you actually have time or feel like doing it. To create a list, click on the red and yellow square icon, and name your new list. Then go ahead and pick the websites you want on that list, and hit “Bundle Tabs!”. This will close all the chosen tabs and open a new tab with the list.

If you don’t want Dossier to close the tabs, you can choose “Bundle Tabs (do NOT remove from window)” instead. From the list you can access each individual website, restore all the tabs, copy the addresses to the clipboard or delete the list.

Now instead of 30 tabs, you can have 3-4 tabs, organized by whatever category you choose. Efficiency galore!

Kuunga

If you use Chrome’s bookmarks and have them well organized, or if you wish to start but find the interface cumbersome, give Kuunga a try. Kuunga creates a whole now starting page, so each time you open a new tab, you actually get Kuunga.

This extension will automatically take your bookmarks and arrange them into huge yellow sticky notes. If you add a link to a list, you’re actually adding a bookmark. If you delete something, you’re deleting an actual bookmark. To add a new sticky note, choose “Add note” from the tabs on the top, and start adding links to it. This will add a new folder to your real bookmarks.

Along with the bookmarks, Kuunga offers access to your most viewed and recently viewed pages, your apps, and all the bookmarks you haven’t so far arranged into folders.

Kuunga works best if you already have organized folders or if you’re starting from scratch. If you’re not, you might do well organizing your bookmarks before you start using it – an advantage by itself!

Tab Position Customizer

Tab Position Customizer is a very simple extension without a lot of bells and whistles, but what it does, it does very effectively. If you don’t like Chrome’s default opening and closing settings for tabs, here is where you can change them. You can choose where new tabs will open, if they open as activated or not activated, and choose which tab will be activated when you close a tab. You’d be surprised how convenient this can be!

Popchrom

Popchrom is one of those extensions that once you start using it, you won’t be able to stop. Do you spend a lot of time typing the same things over and over again? Let Popchrom do it for you!

All you have to do is choose your words/phrases, add abbreviations, assign your hotkey, and you’re good to go. Now type your abbreviation in any textbox in Chrome, hit your hotkey, and… magic! You can use this for e-mail signatures, names you write a lot and even dates. Check out the help section for some useful syntax information.

Conclusion

For people who work with computers all day, small changes can mean major improvements in productivity. We’re all looking for ways to make our lives easier and our work more fluent, and for these purposes, these chrome productivity extensions are definitely keepers.

For productivity outside Chrome, check out:

• 6 Instant Online Services That Boost Online Productivity.
• 10 Free Productivity Apps In The New Mac App Store.

Know of some more ways to keep productive? Share some tips in the comments!

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