4 Productivity Chrome Plugins I Actually Use
Redirector
How often do you instinctively type the letters Y, T, or I into your web browser? And how quickly do those letters populate YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram? Too quickly. And then, before you know it, you’ve been scrolling for fifteen minutes that you’ll never be able to get back. Redirector puts a line of defense in between you and wasted time. It’s a simple Chrome plugin that redirects traffic from a site you choose toward another site you choose. So when work gets confusing, and your brain itches for some dopamine, and you type the letter Y to get some on YouTube, you’ll be saved from wasting time without even thinking about it. I set mine to redirect traffic from Instagram and YouTube to my Google Calendar. As soon as my calendar pops up, I’m reminded of the work I need to do, and I get back to it. It’s also really simple to toggle it on and off for the moments when I do need to check a restricted website for work.
Instafeed Eradicator
The best thing Instagram ever did was make its messages feature available on desktop. Now, I’m logging on Instagram via my desktop to respond to messages, and spending even more time on the app. Instafeed Eradicator does what it says it does: it removes the feed and the stories. Now, when I log on Instagram to check a message or respond to a comment, I’m not pulled into the feed automatically. It’s another great productivity barrier that helps me stay focused when I have work to do on Instagram.
Loom
Why spend 20 minutes writing a long email explaining how to do something when you could spend three minutes explaining it with a screen recording video? Before Loom, I used to do this on my computer, but it took forever. I had to screen record, export the video, upload it to a private YouTube link, get distracted on YouTube for a while, and then finally send it 30 minutes later. Loom uses a software to upload in real time while you record so your video is viewable immediately after you record it. Their free version allows you to record for five minutes at a time, and easily send screen recordings to colleagues and friends. I still use the free version after all this time, because let’s be honest, if my video is longer than five minutes, I’m probably rambling anyway.
Copy All URLs
Copy All URLs automatically copies all the URLs in your browser. I use this to help me batch tasks. Whenever I’m doing research on a topic and compiling a number of links, it helps me stay focused and organized. It can be tricky to find the tab you want when you have more than eight to ten open at a time. So what I do is open all the potentially useful links I can find on a topic. Sometimes I’ll have browsers open with 30+ links. Then I’ll use Copy All URLs to copy them, and I paste them into a spreadsheet, where I can go through them one by one, add notes, and easily reference them later. This plugin also works well when I have a number of tabs open for a specific project, and I need to reference them later on, but I’d rather have them off of my browser for the time being. I just copy them all, paste them to a note, and pull them back later.
