Being a virtual assistant means I juggle different tasks for a variety of clients every day.  I’m always on the look out for ways of increasing my productivity or ways to focus my attention more effectively.

I often read articles on Inc, Entrepreneur, Forbes, to name a few, and one of my bug-bears is advertisements on websites! I understand that websites need advertising revenue in order to run, but I find that trying to read an article nowadays has become a battle of scrolling and avoiding pop-up ads, videos in the middle of the articles etc, not to mention the other related articles and social media alerts in the sidebars!

Recently I came across an add-on for Mozilla Firefox that removes all of the “busyness” from the page you are viewing and shows only the article you’re reading. 🙂  The Reader add-on also features options to change the font style, size & colour, the background colour, box width etc.

Below are before and after Reader screenshots of an article from Inc…

Before Reader

After Reader

You can see how much easier it is to read the article after using Reader. This free little add-on has improved my focus so much when it comes to reading, removing all the distractions and therefore increasing my productivity… which can only be a good thing 🙂

For those of you who use Chrome you’ll be pleased to know they do their own versions which you can find here.