Who might this blog post be useful for?: People who struggle with concentration and motivation, or who find themselves using their phone too much while studying.

What study skills challenges can this app help you overcome?: Poor concentration, procrastination, high distractibility, low motivation.

What is the tool or study skills strategy?: An app that helps you maintain motivation to stay off your phone.

Forest App

Available on iPhone (£1.99) and Android (Free with in-app purchases). Visit their website here.

This app markets itself as an ‘interesting solution to beat phone addiction’, a departure from traditional ‘blocking’ software that we have looked at recently with Cold Turkey and Block-Apps for Android, Blacklist for iOS and Cold Turkey for Desktop. It works by the user planting a seed every time they want to concentrate. If you keep the app open and don’t close it to check your notifications etc. then the seeds flourish into trees (one tree per 30 minutes of concentration) which you collect over time to build a forest. However, if you do close the app then your trees wither and die, which provides the motivation to keep you concentrated. This app also offers the function of looking back over previous days for stats of how long and what you worked on to see how productive you were, which I particularly like!

Features:

• A self-motivated and interesting way to help you beat phone addiction
• Stay focused and get more things done
• Share your forest and compete with friends
• Track your history in a simple and pleasant way
• Earn reward and unlock more tree species
• Customize your whitelist : Leaving Forest and using apps in whitelist won’t kill your tree.

Forest App also partners with Trees for the Future, to plant real trees on the earth.

Thanks for reading,

Rachel