Forest App

Date: 2022-01-27

You plant seeds and trees grow from them and give you fruits.

There are a lot of productive things that you can do today that will give you a lot of benefits down the road. But often they are chores and you don't really get the motivation to do them. You only want to do things that will make you happy right now. Reading books, sitting down and writing, using that brain training app - they are all good but you don't feel like doing them when you don't know how much to do and when to stop.

We need a way to trick our brain into believing that we are getting some instant reward for doing these tasks and we need to get clear goals.

Enter Forest. Forest is based on timers and it has this planting analogy. You start the countdown timer which puts a virtual seed. The times can be any multiple of five, with a minimum of ten. I mostly use 10 or 25. Then until the time is up, you force yourself to do that only task you started doing.

In addition to this, the app shows statistics that make you want to beat your own records. You can see total times clocked only daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. You get this urge to beat your own records. 'Just a little more, just some more to make this a good day' you tell yourself.

I have now used this app for three whole years now. It is one of the best lifestyle changes I made.