On one hand, working from home is truly fantastic. Your commute is as short as the distance from your bed to your laptop. You don't have to deal face-to-face with annoying colleagues, you can enjoy your homemade healthy snacks, and, yes, you can work in your pajamas.
On the other hand, working from home turns your cozy sanctuary into an extension of your workplace, making it challenging to switch off as you would in a physical office.
While there are strategies to address this, such as setting up a dedicated workspace and sticking to specific work hours, there are also some Chrome extensions that can enhance your work-from-home experience.
Image: Momentum
Momentum is a highly popular Chrome extension with over three million users. It replaces your standard new tab page with a "personal dashboard" featuring a beautiful landscape photo, a to-do list, personalized weather information, and inspirational quotes.
If you're someone who likes to center yourself and take a calming deep breath before starting your work, Momentum is the right choice for you. The tool's aim is to create a new tab page that offers a moment of tranquility and encourages productivity by asking you about your daily "main focus" to keep you on track.
Image: Zoom Scheduler
We've all witnessed the remarkable rise of Zoom in 2020. For obvious reasons, the service has seen a substantial increase in users. If your company uses this platform for online meetings, then the Zoom Chrome Extension is a must-have.
The Zoom Chrome Extension enables users to schedule Zoom meetings directly from Google Calendar. With a simple click, you can initiate an instant meeting or set a future meeting time that suits you. Once you've scheduled a Zoom meeting, the meeting URL and additional information are sent via a Google Calendar invitation, allowing participants to join with a single click.
Make your to-do lists digital.
Image: Minimalist Notepad
If you're used to spreading yourself across a spacious desk with notepads, post-it notes, and scattered memos, working from your couch can be challenging. Utilize your work-from-home experience as an opportunity to improve your productivity by transitioning to digital note-taking.
Minimalist Notepad offers a "simple, elegant way" to quickly jot down notes, to-do lists, shopping lists, links, images, videos, and more. You can access it directly from your browser's toolbar in a matter of seconds. While it appears simple, it's fully-featured and supports various formatting options, including font customization, block-quotes, bulleted lists, image and video insertions, and URL links.
You need a break from your desk. Let this Chrome extension help.
Image: Stretchclock
We prioritize well-being with this next suggestion. While you might not be confined to a cubicle, it's easy to remain sedentary for longer than recommended when working on a laptop. Stretchclock is a "professional break reminder for desk warriors." This configurable timer operates in one of your browser tabs, prompting you to stretch at intervals that suit your schedule. When the countdown timer reaches zero, it provides easy "no-sweat" exercises that you can do at your desk, even while dressed in business attire.
It's an excellent way to remind yourself to stay active and prevent back issues and repetitive stress injuries while working from home.
Screenshots are a must when you're on your 46th Zoom call of the day.
Image: Nimbus
Nimbus is a highly versatile tool that offers numerous valuable functions appreciated by over a million users. For the purposes of this article, we'll focus on the extension's ability to help you quickly and easily capture images and videos of your computer screen.
If you're collaborating remotely with colleagues while working from home, explaining processes or instructions over the phone can be challenging. Visuals are crucial in such situations. Nimbus allows you to capture full or partial screenshots, and you can enhance them with graphics, text, highlights, and blurring before sharing them with your colleagues.
Furthermore, Nimbus enables you to create screencasts, making it easy to visually demonstrate processes or tasks without needing complex remote access setups. This is particularly useful when working with colleagues in different time zones.
A must-have extension for all Office users.
Image: Office
If you're a Microsoft enthusiast, which is the case for most workplaces, this convenient extension provides quick access to Office content and services directly from your browser's toolbar.
The Office browser extension is designed for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. By clicking the Office icon, you gain instant access to your favorite online apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and your most recently accessed documents. This streamlines the process of jumping back into your documents, enhancing productivity for Office users.
Whether you're working from home or not, Grammarly is a must-have.
Image: Grammarly
We recommend that everyone installs Grammarly on their Chrome browser, regardless of their work location. This fantastic free tool can significantly improve the quality of your written content.
Grammarly emphasizes that misspellings and grammatical errors can affect your credibility. Reduce that risk with this extension, which automatically corrects your text in Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, and numerous other websites. It highlights misspelled words in red and flags grammatical errors, punctuation misuse, and even evaluates the conciseness of your writing.
If you create a Grammarly account, you can receive a personalized weekly writing report to track your progress and identify areas for improvement.
Banish repetitive typing tasks.
Image: Auto Text Expander 2
If the repetitive nature of typing tasks at your job is a source of frustration, we can help. Auto Text Expander 2 is a handy tool that allows you to create custom keyboard shortcuts to expand and replace text as you type.
While online services like Gmail offer email templates and text suggestion features, this tool takes it a step further. You can program it to automatically insert email addresses, company names, or complete sentences into your online content across the Internet. For example, you can create a shortcut that turns "mc@" into "bossmcbossface@workemail.com." You can create up to 510 keyboard shortcuts to save time and streamline your work.
Not all of these Chrome extensions will benefit everyone, but if they help even a few work-from-home professionals, it's a win. The Office- and Zoom-themed extensions are naturally most useful to users of those services, while others like Grammarly, Momentum, and Minimalist Notepad can enhance the experience of anyone working from a personal computer. Well-being is just as important as productivity, if not more so, so consider installing