Allow me to assure you of one thing: this will not be another one of those articles that shames you for spending a lot of time on your phone. While (for the most part) we enjoy our trips down various social media rabbit holes, I don’t think any of us would have any major objections to cutting down our screen time. We all know we’re addicted to our phones. We say it all the time, tossing the phrase around pretty nonchalantly until we get that sobering notification on Sunday saying our average daily screen time is five hours.
Five hours. It’s pretty blunt and not at all sugarcoated. If you actually click on the graphs Apple stores for you in Settings, you feel pretty called out. But all of those ten-minute Instagram breaks in the library add up. And while I think it’s unrealistic (and honestly, not fun) to completely eradicate your morning and nighttime social media scroll-throughs, eliminating some of those midday study break distractions can help you spend less time in the library and more time on you, apart from academics and obligations.
Enter Forest. I’ve downloaded way too many productivity apps since high school and I’ve scrapped all of them except this one. Comprised of cute graphics, challenges, and a good cause, Forest is a productivity app that is designed to be enjoyed. I downloaded this app during my senior year of high school and whenever I use it, I feel more like I’m playing a game against myself than forcing myself to be productive.
To begin, you set a timer for how long you’d like to be off your phone. Once you select any time between ten minutes and two hours, you plant a virtual tree. This tree will grow in the amount of time for which you’ve set your timer, but if you exit the app for any reason, you’ll kill your tree.
Obviously, the stakes aren’t high when you’re dealing with the life of a fake tree. That’s where the self-competition comes in. If you want to stop your timer to check your phone, you have to click a button that says “give up” which will be quickly followed by a popup: “Are you sure you want to give up? Your cute little tree will die.” Their word choice is intentional. Being forced to click “give up” doesn’t sit right with many people, so this is another way that the app urges you to push through your commitment. And if you exit without clicking “give up,” when you return, you’ll be greeted with a barren tree and a simple tagline “Oops! You can do better next time.”
The rewards, though, are a lot cooler than the stakes. For every tree you plant, you begin to grow a forest that tracks your productivity. You can also categorize the reasons for which you planted a tree and look at graphs to see how much time you devote to certain facets of your life. But Forest knows that people love buying things, even if they’re virtual. Every time you successfully make it through a planting phase, you earn gold coins. These coins can be spent in the shop on different species of trees to plant, background sounds like coffee shops or bustling streets if you need white noise while you work, or even on real trees. This is where the environmental component of Forest comes in. If you collect 2,500 coins, you can buy a real tree that will be planted by Trees for the Future, a partner organization, in Africa. Granted, it takes a lot of time away from your phone to get to 2,500 coins, but helping a good cause while paying nothing and being productive feels really good.
Even if you only need twenty minutes of grind time, Forest is a great way to make sure you actually get stuff done. Ten minutes here and twenty minutes there adds up, but with Forest, it adds up to hours of time for just you. And with midterms descending upon us, we could use any minute to ourselves that we can find.
Disclaimer: This app is $1.99 and I’m well aware that the idea of spending money on an app when you could be spending it on Chick-Fil-A or new fall clothes is pretty unappealing.