November 08, 2013, 12:11 PM — One of the Chrome browser's biggest benefits are the thousands of free extensions written for it. Here are the five to get if you're looking to boost your productivity.
This great extension is for those who want to create and keep track of their to-do lists, reminders, notes, and more. It syncs with the service, which also works with iOS and Android, so that you can keep up to date wherever you are. One of its niftier features is the way it can turn Gmail messages into to-do items.
Here's a great way to keep up to date with all of your RSS and Atom feeds. It alerts you when there are new posts on the feeds, and gives you plenty of free tools for managing and organizing your feeds as well. It's simple to use, clean-looking, and lets you keep track of an enormous amount of breaking information.
If you stored many files on cloud-based services, and often want to send those attachments via Gmail, this extension is for you. Normally, you can't attach files from cloud-based services to your Gmail messages, but you can with this extension, and you won't have to leave Gmail to do it. It works with Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Egnyte and SkyDrive.
If you do any blogging, this extension is for you. It's a blog authoring and editing tool that lets you post to all of your blogs from right within Chrome. A big plus is that it works with just about any blogging tool, including Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, LiveJournal, or any blog that supports the MetaWeblog or MovableType APIs. There's a lot to like here, including the ability to schedule posts.
Who knows where the time goes? One minute you're reading an article on a Web site, and the next minute you look up at the clock and three hours have passed. What have you been doing in all that time? Jumping from site to site, spending time on YouTube, Facebook, and who knows what else. That's where this extension comes in. It tracks how much time you spend on Web sites, and reports to you on how much you've spent on each. It even categorizes the sites you visit, from Very Productive to Very Distracting, and then reports how productive you've been that day, based on what it finds.
http://www.itworld.com/internet/382074/5-great-productivity-boosting-chrome-extensions