Running a small business is all about finding the quickest, easiest way of accomplishing things. You’ve got a limited staff, limited time, and limited resources, but customers don’t want to hear these excuses. They expect a quality product or service, delivered on time, with minimal complications. If you’d like to focus on bringing them that experience, you need to maximize your productivity. And there’s a ton of tech out there to help you do that. Google’s Chrome browser is used by many small business owners, but not all of them are aware of the extensions you can use to make it into a powerful productivity tool. Here are six of them.
Quick Capture
Capturing images of your screen is probably something you do a lot, whether it’s to show an issue with your website to your designer or to share an idea with a team member. Quick Capture lets you capture your screen with a single click, and has an easy-to-use annotation tool so you can point out what you’d like the recipient to look at.
Todoist
Todoist is the most popular task manager for Chrome, and for good reason. It’s a basic to-do list device that’s hiding a ton of awesome features for tracking your progress on projects, collaborating with members of your team, or just remembering to buy groceries. And it syncs across all your devices, so you don’t forget a task you added on your laptop when you’re using your phone later.
HoverReader
If you’re doing a lot of web searches as part of your business, perhaps looking for things to link to from your blog or social media, you’ll almost certainly benefit from HoverReader. You can get an instantaneous preview of the text of almost any webpage just by hovering over the link. It’s a great way to quickly sort through search results without opening new tabs.
Calendly
Scheduling meetings is a hassle, but it’s less of one with Calendly. This plugin lets you set up a meeting with any other user with a single click, and it’ll even comb through both your calendars to find a date and time that you’re both available. It also works with Gmail, Outlook and iCloud to make sure you’re never double booked. No more calling secretaries and canceling misplaced meetings!
Drag
Another Gmail-specific extension, this one is a huge time saver for anyone with tons of messages to sort through. You can set up your emails in terms of stages of completion, like “Do,” “Doing,” and “Done,” so that you don’t miss tasks that absolutely need to be completed, or waste time on those that don’t. Drag gives you a ton of other helpful organization formats as well.
DocuSign
If you’re still printing off PDFs that need to be signed, then scanning them and re-uploading them, you’re about to have a huge weight lifted off your shoulders. DocuSign lets you sign and distribute PDFs right in the Chrome browser. It’s a major time saver and will save you on paper and toner as well.
Productivity is no joke: it determines whether your small business survives or sinks. Use these Chrome plugins to stay ahead of the competition.
