Forest works in a great way. You set the time that you want to be away from your phone, and then you tap plant. If you try to leave the app, it kills your tree if you do not return to it quickly (you can lock your phone however).
Every time that you grow a tree, you earn some in game money. With this money, you can buy extra and cooler trees, and you can plant trees in real life.
Forest is very simple on the surface. However, underneath the surface, Forest is much more complicated. You can assign tags to your activities, and it gives you stats about how much of your time you spend on certain tags, the percentage that you grow a tree, your focused time distribution, and many more stats. You can sort your tags stats by day, week, month or year.
A great feature is that you can see your forest for a certain day, week, month or year. It also tells you how long you have focused for that week, and gives you a chart of the time you focused per day. It’s really cool to see your forest grow over time.
Starting with Forest is easy. Simply open Forest, move the slider to what time you want, and then tap the button below. You will see a timer come up, and that time is the time you have left to grow your tree. You will see your tree change from a little seed to a fully grown tree, and I love seeing my tree develop.
So, now you have planted your tree. If you leave the app, your tree dies if you do not return quickly. This is basically what stops you from going off the app, and it’s quite effective, as it makes you not want to kill your tree.
When you finish growing your tree, you earn money depending how long the tree took to grow. With this money you can buy special trees, and you can also plant trees in real life.
Different trees and bushes can also be bought with the money you earn. These trees can be purchased in the shop section, and allow you to make your forest look more varied, as well as allowing you to discover more cool and fun trees. To change your tree, you simply tap on the tree in the middle of the circle where you set the time, and you select it. Collecting trees adds fun to concentrating, as well as an objective, making sure that you don’t want to kill your tree even more.
Forest also allows you to set background noise, much like the noise you set on sleeping apps that help you fall asleep. You get one noise for free, which is rain, and you can purchase multiple others such as a beach and a forest at night. The noises are very relaxing, however I find that I do not use them much as I prefer silence when concentrating.
If you connect Forest to your Facebook account, you can participate against other people on the leaderboards, and go and check out their forests. If you friends also use Forest, you will find them on the leaderboard too. This is another form of motivation, as you want to beat your friend and grow a better forest then them.
Another new feature is the Achievements section. Here, you can get the in-app money by completing certain tasks, which allows you to unlock trees. It’s pretty cool as it means that you want to complete these tasks to get money.
If you use your iPhone to work, you can switch on a feature that allows you to use your phone. This means that if you switch app, your tree is no longer killed. However, you earn half the coins as a sort of ‘punishment’. This feature is also great if you use Forest on an iPad.
You can create a Forest account that allows you to synchronise your Forest to all your devices. You can also get Forest for Google Chrome, and it also blocks distracting websites.
Forest is a great app, and it is simple and actually works. It stops you from using your phone, and as a result allows you to concentrate. You can get it for iOS, Android, Firefox and Chrome.
You can get forest on the App Store for £1.99 here, on the Google Play store here and on the Google Chrome Store here.
All in all, Forest is a great app, and I would recommend that you check it out and start growing your forest!
Thanks for reading!
Feel free to comment below!
