It happens to the best of us; you mean to spend 10 or 20 minutes reading around on the web, at most, but time slips away from you as each article that you guesstimate as lasting a couple of minutes becomes a five minute or longer affair. Half an hour later, you’re wondering where the time went and wishing you had kept track somehow. Perhaps being able to know in advance how long it would take you to read each page would have helped a bit with time management during your small information binge. If you happen to be a Google Chrome user, a new extension called Readism is here to do just that for you.
The extension claims to provide accurate reading times for the pages and articles you visit or ask about by passing them through a secure server that uses natural language algorithms handwritten by the Readism team. A user can visit a page to net themselves a fancy reading time display in the bottom right quadrant of their browser window, or right click a link that they want to get an estimate on, then click on “Get reading time” in the drop-down menu. A few seconds later, the reading time estimate will pop up, allowing a user to know what they’re getting into before they head to a page and commit to reading a piece of content. The description of the extension even goes out of its way to state its superiority to the similar site feature found on Medium.
Readism was designed with understated elegance in mind, appearing briefly in an out of the way place, then dissipating after a user-specified amount of time. The extension is also lightweight and should be able to run on even the most resource-starved low-end Chromebooks without putting a kink in a user’s workflow or taking terribly long to pull results for a reading time request. According to the extension’s listing in the Chrome web store, personalized reading times based on a user’s reading habits are coming in a future update, though a timeline for such a feature was not announced. Check out the source link to download Readify and get the scoop on pages that you may estimate the reading time before you commit.