I’ve been doing ALOT of online research lately which means a lot of reading. (No, everything is not yet in video form, you still have to read stuff unfortunately. This is not the future I was expecting!)

I’ll be honest, I am a slow reader, and I get frustrated when i’m trying to solve something that should be small and easy but takes forever to fix. i get disctracted and the thing takes days longer to solve than it should. So I’ve found a nice little tool to help keep my mind on the objective at hand and not get distracted. Perfect for slow readers or ADHD people like myself.

It’s called Click2speech. It’s a nice little Chrome Extension that sits up in your menu bar. You can click it one and then click on paragraphs or highlight whole pages to be read outloud to you. That way, you can draw, or scan ahead, or clean your desk or whatever you need to do while still listening to the page audibly. When you hear something of interest or you might need, stop the play back and start reading more closely. Super useful tool. 🙂

If you’re wondering what all those other little extensions are, they’re pretty useful too. The first one is Roboform, which saves and tracks all my passwords and identity info. There is a small yearly fee to use Roboforms features, but it’s well worth it! Then Click2Speech, then Honey, which tries to find discount codes for your online purchases but honestly it is only successful like 10% of the time. Then there’s OneTab which helps save old tabs you might want to go back to later; also helps save on memory, of which Chrome uses alot. The last one is ColorPick Eyedropper which lets me pull colors from websites or pictures I might want to use.

One more tool I find super useful is the Great Suspender. This guy actually stops websites from sending and receiving data after a given amount of time. I have mine set to wait 30min, then it takes a snapshot picture of where the site was at the time it put it into standby. Saves ALOT of memory when you have dozens of tabs going at once like I do.

Hope you find some of these tools useful. What Extensions and tools do you use to help with research?  Reply in the Comments section below.