APP
OF THE
DAY
Forest: Focus for Productivity
Stay focused by Pomodoro timer
With the Forest app, you can plant a virtual tree every time you put down your phone to focus on a project. Stay focused long enough and you plant real trees in real forests.
The app works like this.
You want to work on something without distraction. You open Forest and set a gamified timer, at that instant “planting” a seed in a virtual forest. As time passes and you remain focused on your project, the seed gradually grows into a big healthy tree. But if your attention wanders to your phone and you leave the app… your tree withers and dies.
Nobody wants to kill a tree. (Never mind a whole forest!) So by staying motivated and responsible in Forest’s game format, you get more productive in the real world. Through a unique feature in Forest, users can also redeem virtual coins they earn by staying focused to Trees for the Future, a global tree-planting organization. So far more than 400,000 actual trees have risen from the earth thanks to Forest users.
The app lets you join friends and family members to grow trees, then share your forests with users around the world. You can plant more than 30 tree species, then go browsing to see how your forests have done in a week, a month, or even a year. Keep up with metrics like how many times you’ve picked up your phone and the total number of hours spent on it in a week. Log your focused time as Mindful Minutes with the Health app. You can practice this virtual forestry on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and even Apple Watch.