Faith can move mountains, and your productivity can help fight deforestation.
“The moment of drifting into thought has been so clipped by modern technology. Our lives are filled with distraction with smartphones and all the rest. People are so locked into not being present” — Glen Hansard
Productivity is one of the hardest things to achieve in the modern world. We all live busy lives flooded with social events, responsibilities, and multiple commitments. When we do finally find the time sit down to work or study, we turn to our number one distraction: our phones. With dozens of messages, Snaps, Tweets, and Vines at our fingertips; it’s often difficult to focus on anything at all without getting a nagging feeling to check our phones. In the midst of this, we often procrastinate and ignore the tasks at hand. This is where Forest comes in. Forest is a powerful app with a simple premise: stay off your phone, be rewarded.
How does Forest work?
Forest is simple to use. Set a timer for the amount of time you want to focus on a certain task, start it, and focus. Yep, it’s that easy. Successful aliquots of time will be reward with gold. Gold is Forest’s currency and can be used to buy new shrubs, trees, and background sounds (i.e forest/coffee-shop sounds) that are played as you work. Aside from this, a successful timer is also rewarded with a virtual tree in your garden (as you can see in the picture). The more successful timers you set and complete, the bigger and lusher your forest will be. But how does forest know if you use your phone? If you try to leave the app and use other apps on on your phone, such as Snapchat or Twitter, the tree will wither and die (like your dreams if you continue to be unproductive) and it will remain in your forest (to mock you of your weakness and failure for eternity).
Who cares about virtual forests!? I’m here to save mother nature!
Don’t fret eco-warrior, Forest allows you to help grow actual forests as well! As I previously mentioned, successful timers will be reward with gold and a virtual tree in your garden. Aside from using the gold to unlock more sweet trees and shrubs (Sakuras are my personal fav) to add to your virtual garden,you can use it to plant real trees in real forests! Forest has partnered with companies to plant thousands of trees around the world. One of their partners, WeForest, helped plant over 7,500 real trees in India and Zambia. Currently, the cost to plant a real tree is 2,500 gold. While this does seem like a daunting number, remember that you can accumulate gold from remaining focused and completing tasks. According to WWF, “Forests cover 31% of the land area on our planet … Deforestation comes in many forms, including fires, clear-cutting for agriculture, ranching and development, unsustainable logging for timber, and degradation due to climate change … We’re losing 18.7 million acres of forests annually, equivalent to 27 soccer fields every minute”. As you can see, deforestation is a prevalent issue. We are loosing forests at an alarming rate but Forest allows you to fight back while you are getting work done. One tree will not make or break it, but ever little bit adds up. The app currently sells for $1.99 on the Apple app store and Google play store. A small amount considering the productivity and real-world impact it offers are priceless.
Conclusion
Therefore, if you constantly feel like you are checking your phone when you working and often feel distracted, consider trying Forest. It will help you focus at the task at hand, while helping fight deforestation with little to no effort on your part.
Thank you for reading, please feel free to 👏 and share to help others find it.
See you soon. 😃
