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Google Chrome made its debut in 2008 when Microsoft Internet Explorer was dominating the market. Ten years later in 2018, Chrome’s market share soared to 70% while IE’s collapsed to 8.2%, making its name synonymous with slow speeds.
IE discontinued in 2022
Today, Chrome has a market share of 65.5% followed by 18.8% of Safari, and then others. From a more practical UI that allows you to perform tasks more productively to a pool of extensions that optimize your browsing experience, Chrome has it all.
In fact, that’s precisely what we’ll discuss in this blog: The best Chrome productivity extensions and what they offer. There are over 137,000 Chrome extensions altogether. We have personally used a lot of them (before we created timegram) and each one contributed to our workflow, allowing us to get more work done in less time.
Here are some of the best Chrome extensions that you and your team can use to enhance productivity (we don’t necessarily use all of these, but we can vouch for them for sure).
Chrome Productivity Extensions for Managers
All of these extensions are free.
Tool #1: Loom
When you’re working remotely and want to explain a process to your team, an ideal way to go about it is by recording a short video. You can then share that video with one or more people on the team, allowing them to view it at their convenience and as many times as they like. Loom allows you to do exactly that.
The Loom extension allows you to begin recording simply by clicking on the extension icon. You can choose if you want to record the screen, system audio, external mic, or all of them simultaneously.
Loom adds to your productivity by removing the hassle of explaining slightly complicated workflows to your team, ensuring effective communication and comprehension at the receiving end. As a bonus, people can comment on the video, allowing your team to collaborate effortlessly.
Tool #2: ClickUp
Creating and managing multiple tasks can become tedious for you as a manager, especially if you have several clients onboard. ClickUp’s Chrome extension allows you to do this for multiple projects, allowing you to keep the work streamlined without having to leave your browser.
You also get a notepad in ClickUp’s Chrome extension where you can easily take notes to refer to later, making team management significantly simpler for you or save websites as tasks.
This type of readily access allows you to expedite your work-pace – something you wouldn’t be able to do if you had to constantly switch between apps to add or edit projects.
Tool #3: Google Keep
Whether you’re researching visual material for design or have come across something really interesting that might come in handy for your development team, Google Keep lets you save it for later. You can save particular material or pieces of information instead of bookmarking entire URLs (although you have that option too).
Google Keep throws in some extra features to streamline your saved work. You can sync it to access the content across devices, build categories to sort items by project name, add labels to notes, etc.
Tool #4: Hypercontext
Another excellent way to boost your productivity while managing a team is through the Hypercontext Chrome extension.
A common concern for most remote managers is that all the data and information about events and meetings is always scattered in different emails, bookmarks, and chats. Hypercontext resolves this concern by creating a collaborative workspace where all your notes, meeting agendas, queries, and ideas are saved in real time. This offers transparency into all the collaborative tasks – be it a meeting or a brainstorming session – which is helpful especially while managing a remote team.
Hypercontext also allows you to automate tasks like sharing minutes of the meeting or acquiring relevant insights from the conversations with your team over your preferred platform. In short, if you are leading a collaborative team, Hypercontext can truly make your workflow seamless.
Tool #5: Diigo
If you’re leading a research team and want to collect all your raw data into a consolidated window, Diigo has got you covered. In addition to taking screenshots, the extension allows you to annotate and archive files, making it easier to comprehend for others.
You can easily share the annotated files across social media through the extension itself. To further streamline your research work, you can create a pool of your findings and categorize them into groups to avoid clutter and potential mix-ups while reviewing researched data for different projects.
Chrome Productivity Extensions for Employees
Tool #6 Marinara
Managing time to make sure you complete your daily tasks can be challenging, especially with the countless distractions like social media or that gossip session with your bestie at work. Marinara allows you to avoid all of these distractions and get maximum work done by following the Pomodoro approach (that’s why it’s also marketed as the Pomodoro Assistant)
With the app’s extension, you will be able to manage breaks and time your work through a dedicated countdown timer. What’s best is that you also get insights into your work like how much time you wasted during the day, where you spent the most and least bit of time, and how focused you were during the work hours.
Such statistics help you improve focus while identifying and cutting down on parts where you lose valuable working hours. In a nutshell, it’s the perfect Chrome extension to have for distraction-free work.
Tool #7 StayFocusd
Another great extension to improve your work productivity is StayFocusd. Unlike Marinara, it takes matters into its own hands by limiting the time you can spend on social media and other non-work-related websites.
By doing so, StayFocusd allows you to keep your focus clear to get more work done during the day. You also have the option to add or delete URLs from the restricted websites list and make customizations based on your preferences.
For instance, a particular task may require you to watch YouTube videos to get inspiration for your next marketing campaign. You can simply remove YouTube from the restricted list to get the work done. Moreover, if you need to visit a certain page for work purposes but don’t want to interact with certain elements on that page, StayFocusd has an option for that too. The app allows you to restrict time on in-page elements like videos, images, games, etc., to improve your productivity.
Tool #8 Dashlane
Most Americans take anywhere from four to ten minutes to change a password if they forget it. Here’s a detailed review of a survey about time lost in resetting passwords. If your work requires you to have multiple accounts on different websites (think link-building tasks), it becomes difficult and sometimes impossible to remember all those IDs and passwords.
And in case you forget a few, you’ll waste time recovering it. Furthermore, since you’re distracted from your primary task, it can take a while before you get back to it, which means more time wasted just because you couldn’t remember your password.
Dashlane solves this problem by remembering all your IDs and passwords for you. The 20,000+ businesses that are using this extension vouch for its multi-tier safety protocols as it has never been breached. Dashlane also helps you auto-generate passwords and save information for auto-filling forms later, making the entire process of creating accounts and remembering (login) data simple.
Tool #9 Todoist
All of us know how critical work-life balance is, but not many of us know how to achieve it. This is where Todoist for Chrome steps into the picture. This app allows you to organize your work by creating tasks directly from websites: you can save a blog-post to read later, or save it as a task so you can take design inspiration from it.
Todoist also lets you create a daily planner with a checklist to follow-up on during the day so you don’t miss out on that important meeting or approaching project deadline. You can also add people to different tasks right from within the Chrome extension, or track your daily productivity by reviewing your progress at the end of each work-day.
Tool #10 The Great Suspender Original
How many times have you opened countless tabs on your Chrome when you’re only actually using two or three of them? We reckon a lot! We fear that if we close the tab, we might need it later and would have to go through the hassle of reopening it from the browser history.
But the truth is, you never really need those additional 50 URLs to get the job done, and The Great Suspender Original knows that. This Chrome extension suspends tabs you aren’t using so you can focus on the ones you actually are.
By doing this, the extension not only allows you to focus better but also saves up additional RAM to allow your device to maintain a stable performance. You can also schedule a suspension time for tabs or save them to access later.
A Better Way to Enhance Productivity
Looking for a more complete solution?
Try timegram.
timegram is a time tracking and project management tool that tracks your time spent on various tasks during the day and neatly groups them by platform so you can easily review your activity later. The app also allows you to identify patterns and improve your productivity accordingly.
Or simply use its dedicated productivity insights feature to find out where you spend most of your time or which tasks took longer than expected to complete. Just sign-up to timegram, and let it take care of the rest.
FAQs
What are some fun Chrome extensions?
Some fun Chrome extensions include:
- Fun Cursors
- Super Netflix
- Mi Emoji
What is the most used Google extension?
Google Translate is arguably the most used Google extension in Chrome.
How do I monitor activity on Chrome?
There are plenty of extensions that allow you to monitor your activity on Chrome such as:
- Webtime
- Timebite
- Screentime
How do you block website procrastination?
You can block website procrastination by using a dedicated browser for it. A good one to start with is StayFocusd.
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