What are your favorite browser extensions for productivity, readers? Which ones do you use personally or for work — and how do you use them?
(Which ARE your favorite browsers? I use Chrome about 90% of the time, but sometimes Microsoft Edge…)
I’ve mentioned a lot of my favorites before…
My Favorite Browser Extensions
One Tab
I am one of those people who frequently has too many tabs open, and OneTab is a really handy extension that closes ALL of them at once, but keeps a list of where you’ve been. So when I’m overwhelmed, trying to shut down quickly, or some combination thereof, I just click the little OneTab funnel and everything in that browser condenses down to one tab with a list (and links) to the URLs I was on.
One important thing to note: it only works per browser screen, so if you have multiple browser screens open with multiple tabs, then you have to click the OneTab funnel on each browser screen. (Yeah… don’t ask me how I know this.)
Do I go back to my old links? No, almost never. Would I have kept them all open if I hadn’t used OneTab, out of fear that I’d lose something important and irretrievable? Yup.
You can get OneTab here. (I use the free version, but I think there’s a paid one also. You can also use OneTab to import or export a list of links, which I also do (see my notes on LinkGrabber, below).
Evernote
As I wrote in my post with tips on using Evernote as an online planner, I really like to use Evernote to clip articles and otherwise use it as a “digital brain.” I shared more Evernote tips for moms over on CorporetteMoms — I find it really helpful for keeping track of all sorts of information for my kids, from where they are currently to things that will be far in the future.
I use it for articles (such as health-related research), helpful Facebook comment threads, notes from conversations/appointments, for paperwork that I want to keep digitized, and more.
(I actually HAVE been in the middle of a conversation with someone and said OH, wait, let me check those test results (or whatever) that I know I’ve uploaded to the Evernote cloud. Even if it’s in low WiFi I’ve had better luck using Evernote for this sort of quick recall than the general medical health app or something else. (You could also use the iCloud Notes app for this, but I find Evernote to be a lot more robust.)
Morphine
I found Morphine when I switched to Chrome, because I had used something called Leechblock when Firefox was my preferred extension. I still use it, mostly to limit my time on sites where I get sucked in (cough, Facebook)…
As I wrote in my review of Morphine in the past:
The idea is that you only “earn” time with the URLs you put in Morphine after you’ve been using the computer for more productive purposes for a certain amount of time. Perfect.
I used to have it set to 1 minute of play time for every 10 minutes of work time, but that left me with far too many minutes in my bank — so I switched it to 1 minute of play time for every 60 minutes of work time.
That was a bit too little (I’ve decided I need at least 3 minutes to look at Facebook, even using the Social Fixer plugin, because when I try to sneak a peek for one minute, and inevitably try to refresh it for another minute more, it would take me at least 30 seconds to find my place scrolling down the page.
(Huh – I totally forgot about the Social Fixer plugin, which hides sponsored posts and more from FB… it looks like it was recently updated so I may have to give that one another try since my Facebook feed is chock full of totally random “suggested for you” posts. I get enough memes on my own, thankyouverymuch… )
You can find out more about it here.
Library Extension
I turned Kate on to this one, so she wrote a Library Extension review — I love it as an easy way to remind myself to use my library. If there’s a book I want, it’s almost certain one of my libraries has the e-book or audiobook.
1Password
I just switched to this one after my longtime password program/browser extension, LastPass, had a zillion data breaches. After some relatively lazy research, I decided to give 1Password a try.
I do like 1Password but some of the extra security is a bit annoying, like having to log in frequently on my own desktop, and how difficult it is to set the program up on a new device.
(I may just switch to a master password that only uses my left hand so I don’t have to take my right hand off the mouse… for some reason that’s always what annoys me most when I try to open it up.)
You can learn more about it here.
LinkGrabber
This is probably only useful for me, but this extension can extract all of the URLs from a web page so you just have a long list of them. I then use OneTab to import the URLs and do blog-related tasks, like checking links when I’m updating posts.
(I used to have a VA do this, but at the time my VA was based in the Philippines and a lot of the links that weren’t working for her were just fine for me.) You can get LinkGrabber here.
Browser Extensions I’ve Used and Liked in the Past…
I’ve just kind of gotten out of the habit of using these browser extensions, but I still like them…
- Forrest – great if you enjoy gamifying your focus… for me because a lot of the sites I legitimately go to for work (Nordstrom, Amazon, etc) are also often distractions for me, it just didn’t work the best for me.
- Momentum – great if you like keeping to-dos right in front of you because they open in new browser tabs! I somehow was accidentally paying for two subscriptions, which they were very nice to refund me the second one when I realized, and then I hadn’t been using either of them so I just stopped. I may go back eventually. Here was Kate’s Momentum review.
Readers, what are some of your favorite browsers — and which are the best browser extensions for productivity and focus?
Kat
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