The modern world is full of distractions. No matter how much we might tell ourselves that we are going to sit down and work without distractions until the end of the day, most of us rarely make it that far.
The following five Chrome extensions can help to reduce the number of distractions around you during the workday and help you to turbocharge your productivity.
One Tab
If you’re anything like us, then it doesn’t take you long to end up with a dozen or more open tabs when using Google Chrome. In many cases, these tabs are spread across multiple windows and there is no hope of you keeping track of them all.
One Tab is a Chrome extension that enables you to take all of your open Chrome tabs and combine them into a single tab. All of the tabs that you had open will now appear as links within this one tab and you can click them to open individual tabs as you need them. This means that you don’t need to clutter up your bookmarks in order to save important pages for later.
xTab
XTab is a similar extension to One Tab but with a few key differences. First and foremost, the main feature of xTab is that it lets the user set a maximum number of tabs and then prevents them from exceeding this number. If the user goes over their self-imposed limit, then they will lose one of their already-open tabs.
By making sure that the tabs that you lose through opening an excessive number are irretrievable, xTab manages to be just annoying enough to discourage the user from going over their limit and functions as a useful conditioning tool. If you want to get into good habits with your browser tabs, this is a good extension to use.
BlockSite
BlockSite is another excellent Chrome extension that helps you to minimize the potential for distractions when you need to be focusing the most. We all have days where we find it difficult to focus, but by developing good habits and getting into a routine with our work and other commitments, we can all dramatically improve our productivity. BlockSite’s Chrome extension helps you to do just that.
Like StayFocused, BlockSite enables the user to block access to the most problematic websites – the ones that distract them the most. By giving the user the ability to block distractions and stay focused during the most important parts of the day, BlockSite makes it much easier to get ahead.
Just Read
For some reason, Chrome is still lacking an officially-supported reader function. Just Read solves this issue and provides a sleek and minimalist reader tool. Whether you are a professional worker or a student, if you need to read lots of information from web pages, using ‘reader mode’ enables you to strip away all of the extraneous images and other media that is just getting in the way, leaving you with just the text.
Todoist
If you are looking to improve your productivity and stay focused, a to-do list is the way to go. Todoist provides users with a simple distraction-free interface for their to-do list tool. Todoist is the perfect balance of simplicity and features, doing everything that you could possibly want a to-do list extension to do without overcomplicating things. The Todoist extension also syncs up with the iOS and Android app versions.
With the right extensions on your side, Chrome can be an aid in your battle against distractions, not another source of them. The five extensions above are just some of the many distraction-reducing extensions available – check out the Chrome store for more.
