One of my law students has told me about an app that she is using to stay focused while she is studying: Forest App. The app is free for Android phones (of course with ads) and modestly priced for others.
The app reminds me of Pomidoro (the tomato for those of you who visualize rather than have name recognition). You can choose the number of minutes that you want to stay focused: 10 minutes up to two hours.
If you avoid distractions for 30 minutes, your animated sapling begins growing into a tree right before your eyes. Platitudes such as "What you plant now you will harvest later" and "You are almost there" pop up at intervals. 10 – 25 minutes grows a bush.
Keep planting trees through 30-minute sessions of focusing to get a woodland, and eventually a forest. You can track your daily progress and view your woodland.
If you get distracted away from your tree, the sapling or tree dies – in fact if you tap "give up," the app will remind you that you will kill your cute little tree. Definitely a visualization of the cost of losing focus!
Like many of these apps you can cheat – walk away from task and let the timer run or go to another screen before returning to task, for example. But, as long as you care about being more productive and stay honest, it works as a good focus timer.
The press kit and some reviews of the app talk about how users can earn virtual credits/gold coins that will result in real trees being planted in deforested areas through a tie-in with WeForest. I earned 9 gold coins for a 25-minute session and 3 gold coins for 10 minutes. It apparently takes 2500 gold coins to plant a real tree
For those of us who are environmentally friendly, the real-tree incentive can help us stay on task, so the earth benefits from our study or work efforts. (Amy Jarmon)
