There are just a handful of tools that I find indispensable, in my everyday work. In fact, when people ask me why I still use a Windows computer, I tell them a main reason is that I can’t get all my favorite tools on a Mac, or I don’t want to spend the time searching them out.

Chrome Browser Tools

I use the Chrome browser all the time, now. Unfortunately, I have so many projects going on, and things I’m interested in, I have tons of windows and tabs open at any given time. Of course, this makes it really hard to find things, and bogs down my machine. I just checked, and I have 42 windows and 293 tabs open. I know this is insane, but this is how I work…

A few Chrome extensions help, and some are really essential.  Here they are, not in any particular order:

Session Buddy – I use this extension to track all my open windows and tabs, so when I need to restart Chrome,  or it crashes, I can get all my tabs back in seconds. Obviously, this is huge.

The Great Suspender – This extension suspends tabs after a timeout, when I’m not actively working in them. It saves a lot of CPU cycles and memory, allowing me to actually get work done, despite all of the tabs I have open.

Quick Tab – I just added this one recently, and it is a huge time saver. With so many tabs open, I used to spend a crazy amount of time trying to find the one tab I needed at any given moment. Say, checking my email – which tab was Gmail in? With this extension, I just type in a few characters from the title of the page (e.g. “gmail”), and it shows me all the tabs that contain that string, and boom! I’m back to work.

Evernote Web Clipper – I save everything interesting that I find online in Evernote, as my primary file system. The clipper makes it super easy to add a page, selection, bookmark, or whatever, in real time.

Readwise – Although I primarily use Readwise to collect my Kindle highlights, and return them to me via a daily email, I can also grab chunks of text from any window, and instantly save it to Readwise as a note. Readwise even creates an article entry for me automatically. And, I don’t forget to come back to it, because Readwise sends it back to me, along with my highlights and other notes, in my daily email.