Top 10 Chrome Extensions 2018

Intricately Right now I'm using the free trial version but it's one of the best apps out there if you want to know what a company is paying in terms of IP services like Hosting and CDN. If it's something you think you'd be interested in you should totally use my link to sign up. It gives me a week or so of free premium service. I cannot say enough great things about this application, both the chrome extension and the native application. If you work in technical sales and you're trying to sell SaaS, CDN, DNS, Hosting, etc to clients, these are the guys you want on your team.




Datanyze is probably my second most used extension at work. One 
click and I can see all the technology a website is using. It's a lot easier than scrubbing the HTML of the site myself. It's not the most reliable system in the world but it gives me a heads up of what I'm looking at. It also frequently has a list (including emails) of some of the people who work there. Score one for the home team.

Hootlet has been a gift from the internet gods. I manage multiple social media accounts for a variety of organizations and without the ability to schedule posts in one centralized location I would probably lose my mind. The best thing about Hootlet is that I can schedule a post from any site, anytime. Rather than having to copy whatever media/information I want to share to a variety of social media sites, I can just click on my favorite little owl, and he does the hard work for me.

Ok guys, confession time, I'm using this one right now. Grammarly helps me stay on top of my grammar, punctuation, and spelling when posting online. This is how I manage not to sound like an idiot most of the time. It's certainly not perfect, but I mean, who is? You can also add it to Word to help you with your computer as well. I think it WAY outperforms native spellcheck. 


SimilarWeb links me to other websites/apps that share common factors with whatever I'm looking at. It's amazing for finding prospects or when I'm boycotting a certain site but still need a similar service.

Sidekick by HubSpot not only tells me when my emails are being read but also if someone clicks one of the links I send them. It also allows me to integrate my emails into SalesForce.

Honey, WikiBuy, Ebates and Amazon Assistant are all the personal shopping assistants I need when shopping online. I MAY have an online shopping problem, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be getting the best possible deals! These little guys tell me when something is cheaper elsewhere, and supply me with coupon codes when relevant, earn me cashback and allow me to save things to my Amazon shopping list. I can't recommend one over the others because they're all integral to my online shopping addiction. 

And a bonus...The Great Suspender
At work I tend to have... well let's not talk about how many tabs I have open at a time. This extension automatically suspends the tabs I'm not using so they don't use up CPU.


So what about you guys? What's your favorite chrome plug-in?

Productivity Tips for Office Managers

I think anyone who's worked in an office environment recognizes that Office Managers end up with an awful lot of work on their desk. Whether you are acting as an Office Manager or Executive Assistant, many of the challenges hindering productivity and organization can be similar.  In small businesses, the impact can be much larger since headcount may be limited.  However, these challenges can be easily overcome by taking a step back from the day-to-day craziness to "see the forest from the trees."

There are 2 approaches to trying to streamline your own productivity. One can be to create a long list of all the areas where productivity can be improved. That approach will usually leave you with even more work, and frustration. Instead, I suggest focusing on a few areas where increasing productivity will have the largest impact.

Based on my conversations with business owners and office managers the biggest frustrations come from:

• Overflowing email boxes
• Prioritization of tasks
• Delegation & Follow-Up

While Email Inbox Organization can be extremely simple it is also very hard to get started. You need to implement archiving for older messages so they aren't cluttering your inbox, set up strong filters for spam, and then read and prioritize the remaining emails. A good IT company can make this a much simpler process. Bringing in an MSP to manage your email server and put the proper filtering in place can help streamline productivity here, after that though it's up to each individual employee to read through all the remaining emails, and either delete them or create a follow-up task. In reality, each email is asking a simple yes or no question: Is this information pertinent? If it's not, delete it. If the information is pertinent to your business is there an action that needs to be taken? Create a task with a reminder to follow up on that action item. Outlook 365, and it's multitude of plug-ins allow you to easily create and complete tasks daily. 

Prioritizing tasks can be a challenge no matter what industry or position you are in. One of the largest challenges here can be keeping up with tasks across a bunch of platforms. The first step I suggest is to choose one application or service to keep track of all your tasks. Whether you choose to do this in your CRM, email, calendar or third party software/application is up to you. A good IT company can help point you in the right direction for your business. For example, if you're using a CRM (like Salesforce) chances are there is a plug-in to push/pull your appointments and tasks from the cloud to your Outlook calendar. A little bit of research on yours, or your IT company's part could save a lot of time and headache down the line. 

Delegation can be a tough egg to crack for Office Managers who on top of their own jobs and tasks somehow always end up with everything everyone else is struggling with coming to their desk. It's important to ask yourself what is my job description? What is the job description of my colleagues and employees? What needs to be done, and whose job is it to complete it? How many minutes/hours a day are you spending on tasks that aren't really yours to complete? Are you spending time on server maintenance or computer upkeep? What is the value of those minutes and hours? Does it make sense to hire an assistant, an in-house IT person, an outside sales rep, or outsource your IT to a managed services provider? Or, is there someone/something in-house that needs to be fixed so that the employees you already have can be productive? Only you can answer these questions based on your business model, but it can be great to have 3rd parties consult on your ROI (return on investment) concerning specific aspects of your company.

Favorite Chrome Plugins

Datanyze is probably my most used extension at work. One click and I can see all the technology a website is using. It's not the most reliable system in the world but it gives me a heads up of what I'm looking at. It also frequently has a list (including emails) of some of the people who work there. Score one for the home team.


Intricately Right now I'm using the free trial version but it's one of the best apps out there if you want to know what a company is paying in terms of IP services like Hosting and CDN. If it's something you think you'd be interested in you should totally use my link to sign up. It gives me a week or so of free premium service. Dooooo it.



Pin It Button from Pinterest is one of my favorites that isn't for work. I love being         able to pin anything from it's source directly to Pinterest. I mostly us it to promote       my blog (shhh)


D-Mail FINALLY a way to un-send my emails. Dmail ensures only the intended recipient will be able to read the body of your email. As the sender, you can revoke access to any message sent with Dmail at any time, even after it’s been read.

Shareaholic for Facebook much like the Pin It button this one allows me to share content directly to Facebook from any site. Extremely useful when I find an article I like.

Sidekick by hubspot not only tells me when my emails are being read, but also if someone clicks one of the links I send them. It also allows me to integrate my gmails into SalesForce.

SimilarWeb links me to other websites/apps that share common factors with whatever I'm looking at. It's amazing for finding prospects or when I'm boycotting a certain site but still need a similar service


Lazarus recovers form entries for me when my browser crashes or if I do something idiotic and delete everything or go back a page.

The Great Suspender
At work I tend to have... well let's not talk about how many tabs I have open at a time. This extension automatically suspends the tabs I'm not using so they don't use up CPU.

Invisible Hand let's me know when an item I'm looking at would be cheaper somewhere else. It's like... the worlds best shopping assistant.