Top five Google Chrome extensions to up your remote working skills

Webtime Tracker

While being productive is very important while we’re all working from home, taking care of your digital wellbeing and making sure you have a healthy work and life balance is equally necessary. Webtime Tracker works like the Digital Wellbeing feature on most modern smartphones, keeping track of all the websites you visit and how long you spend. You’ll be able to see detailed statistics based on the domain you visited and visualise your usage with graphs -- the whole extension works while you’re offline.

Ugly Email

Emails don’t have to be stressful, but sometimes senders use certain tools like pixel tracking, embedding a tiny invisible image inside an email, that can act as a “read receipt”. This lets them know when you have read their message. This isn’t ideal, since you should be able to read emails on your own terms. Ugly Email will quickly zip through your emails and look for those nasty pixels and block the tracking pixel. It even throws in a small eye icon for each mail in your inbox so you know who’s trying to check if you looked at their emails!

OneTab

Have you ever suffered from tab fatigue? Have you opened too many tabs and wished for some way to control them? This extension gives you one button to turn them into a quick list instead. When you need to look at them again, you can use the extension to bring them up again. According to the developer of the OneTab extension, pushing your open tabs into a list that can be easily reopened again can save up to 95 percent memory – a bold claim. You may also be able to load your computer quicker from sleep, according to the developer, presumably due to the smaller list of open, active tabs that need to be reloaded.

Save to Google Drive

If Google Drive is your cloud provider of choice, or if your employer uses Google Workspace, then the Save to Google Drive extension will come in very handy to move web content as your browse the web. This includes a variety of content such as images, hyperlinks, documents – even HTML5 audio and video. After you install the extension, you can right-click to add a link or photo to your personal Google Drive or Workspace drive. The extension will also allow you to export a PDF of the existing page that you are currently browsing, using the Chrome Print menu.