This Chrome extension makes your Facebook addiction productive

Anyone with a Facebook account is familiar with the blackhole that the News Feed can become. What starts as a quick catchup with your friends and family's updates can quickly descend into hours of time wasted scrolling past viral links and photos.

But while News Feed is considered something of a productivity killer, other parts of Facebook, like Groups and Messenger, can be extremely useful for school or work.

Thus, an entire ecosystem of tools dedicated to making people more productive on Facebook has sprouted up. Enter Todobook, which redirects you to your work when you're whiling away time on your News Feed.

The Chrome extension replaces your News Feed with a simple to-do list where you can add tasks and mark them as done. If you finish all your tasks for the day, you "unlock" five minutes of News Feed time.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

When displaying the to-do list, the extension hides Facebook's notifications icon, probably the most distracting element on the site. The tool also has a "quitter" button on the bottom left corner of the list that lets you quickly bypass the list and go straight to your News Feed -- for when you absolutely need your fix of cooking videos and engagement announcements.

"I love News Feed, I just want a more healthy relationship with it," Ian McCrystal, Todobook's founder and developer told Mashable. "So I wanted a way to keep up my productivity while still having access to the less-distracting parts of FB. I had tried blocking facebook.com entirely in the past, but that doesn't work. Facebook delivers too much social value to block it entirely. Now I can use it while staying productive."

Todobook strikes a great balance between keeping your access to Facebok and leveraging it to make you more productive. The app has a clean and intuitive user experience and is definitely worth a try.

You can get Todobook here.