Happy first day of September! A year after my first Chrome extensions post, I realize that I should probably update it with the additional tools that I’ve added. The theme of this post is a handful of productivity related tools, with a sprinkle of slightly less productive tools.

Fall term is about to begin soon at Waterloo, so a few of these might be useful for those of you in school or taking any major exams!

Honey – if you do as much online shopping as I do you’re definitely going to want to add this to your Chrome toolbar. At checkout, Honey automatically scours the net for promo codes and tests them all on your purchase and applies the best one.

HoverZoom – I’ve been trying this extension out for a bit because a friend recommended it as a better alternative to RES on Reddit at least. It automatically shows you gifs/pics if you hover over the link or file, and shows you a full-sized version. The lazy part of me likes that I can skip clicking altogether especially since I subscribe to a lot of picture-based subreddits. If the constant image popping up thing is not your jam you can also just whitelist the sites you want through the settings.

Auto Replay for Youtube – So I’m one of those people that will play the same song on repeat if it’s something I love at the moment. I’m the worst – I know. I did this right after I watched the Game of Thrones finale and I was obsessed with Light of the Seven. I’m also sometimes too lazy to just download a song off Youtube to play on a desktop player.

StayFocusd – If you are like me and you have no actual self-control when it comes to focusing and staying off social media and other time-consuming websites, this extension will probably be a godsend for exam crunch time. You set the amount of time you’re allowing yourself to be on certain sites and once you’ve run out the extension blocks the site.

Noisli – I usually study to music but sometimes even instrumentals can’t help me focus. White noise is always a good bet though, and Noisli lets you customize a mix of noises that help you focus. The main product is on their website but the extension lets you trigger your custom mixes from any site.

Citethisforme – Again, the extension is just an extension of the main site. Sorry, that was actually a terrible pun/joke. I’m not taking out of this post though. I write a lot of papers for my program which means a lot of research and a hell of a lot of citation. CTFM is one of my favourite citation sites because it’s super straight forward. If you’re pulling down a lot of research from websites, the extension lets you add it to an ongoing list of citations directly from the site which should help you keep your sources organised and saves you some time at the end of your paper.

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If you have any other extensions that you can’t live without, let me know!