Since it’s already a new year, it’s time once again for resolutions, goals, challenges, and basically all kinds of lists that we want to accomplish this year. If you wrote “stay away from the internet more” or “focus on work/school more”, then we wish you the best of luck, as those are some of the more difficult ones, what with all of us being connected almost all the time. There are some developers that want to help you overcome this challenge and one of the apps for this purpose is called Forest – stay focused.
From the name, you would think that this actually means you will have forest images or sounds from your phone to help you breathe and focus. Well, to some extent, it is. It actually is a pretty inventive way of getting you to focus by bringing you virtual tree incentives. You start out by planting a seed in your forest. For every 30 minutes that you stay away, the seed will grow into a tree. If you’re a good girl or boy, at the end of the day, you might have grown a forest or at least a grove of trees, if you stayed away from your phone. But every time you touch your device, your tree will wither away.
So at the end of the day, you can either end up with a thriving forest or just a few twigs. But what seems good on paper apparently did not translate well in reality. Some people say that it wasn’t working on their device, there were a lot of errors, and some say that even if they don’t touch their phone, every time they receive a notification, their tree still dies.
But if you believe that this may just be some initial bugs and the developer will eventually be able to fix them, you can download the Forest app from the Google Play Store for free. Here’s hoping that it does get fixed since this is a pretty neat idea to keep you away from your phone.
