This Chrome extension brings Medium’s best feature to the whole Web

Productivity is the by-word of high-achievers everywhere. Pack more into your finite time and you’ll get more done. Simple.

One way to help claw back a few minutes might be to limit the amount of ‘useful’ time you spend doing things you could better achieve at another time, like on the commute to work, for example. A simple Chrome extension called Readism should help you achieve this, and has just one job: to accurately tell you how long it’s going to take you to read an article (or entire book, if you have more time on your hands).

It’s like Medium’s most useful feature, applied to the whole Web.

To use it, all you need to do is install the Chrome extension. Really, that’s it if you want a general indication of reading time – you won’t even need to sign up or sign in.

If you want to get a slightly more accurate idea of how long an article is going to take to read, then creating an account walks you through a paragraph of test text in order to see how quickly you read. Don’t skip ahead though, you’ll be tested on three parts from it.

Once you’ve done that, you’re all set and each time you load an article in your Chrome browser, a little pop-up reading time button will appear in the bottom-right corner of the page. The extension’s icon also shows how long the current article will take to read, as you can set the page reminder to fade out after a few seconds.

You can adjust the length of time it stays on-screen and the size of the notification in the settings.