Forest is free but it has a recommended paid version within the app that will allow you to unlock all the options and that we recommend since its price is only 1.99 euros on Android to unlock all the available functions.
For whom?
Forest can be recommended for students who want to put down their mobile phones, whether they are in high school or exams, but also for anyone looking to put down the phone a little or not be so distracted. It works on your smartphone if you want to leave Slack when your workday is over, if you want to focus on forgetting about the world while reading or spending time with your family, or if you find that you look too much at different applications.
How does it work
Forest works very simply. On the main screen you have a tree. You choose a tree that you have available (As you progress you will unlock coins to buy more) and you choose the time. You can mark timefrom 10 minutes to 80 minutes. In addition, it also allows you to choose categories if you later want to have a summary about what you have been doing or what you have spent time on. For example, you can create tags by subjects or by tasks if you are a student (read, underline, summarize, review …) You can also leave the categories that come by default: Leisure, general, social, rest, sport, etc.
Once you have chosen a tree and time, just click “Plant”. During that time your tree will be growing. You will see on the screen how it growsor. At first it is simply a seed and it progresses as time goes by. You will also see a stopwatch with a countdown to see how much time you have left. You can exit the app but if you exit and open another app your tree will die and remain dead in your global “garden”.
Unlock trees
As you are planting trees and you are adding concentration moments, you are earning coins. These coins can be exchanged for unlocked trees. When you have enough coins you can buy a new tree that you will use to plant.
White list
From the Forest settings we can set up a blanc listto or list of allowed apps. This will help in case you need to use your phone while studying or working. For example, you can leave Slack allowed or you can allow notes, the Wikipedia application or the mobile phone calculator, for example. Just go to “Settings” in the phone app now “List of allowed apps”. You can mark as many as you want or change them according to the day or the needs you have in each of the concentration sessions carried out.
Forest
The application has a kind of garden or summary that will allow you to see what you have done in the last day, the last week, month and year. You will be able to see the trees that you have planted but also your failures, the trees that have died because you have left the application. If you touch on a tree or on “Description” you will see a list with the tasks: time it starts, time it ends, total time, tree planted and category to which that time belongs.
Royal forest
One of the interesting points of Forest is that it has a real forest. Not only are you managing to concentrate but the application collaborates with the association Trees for the future and it has more than a million trees planted in African countries.
Achievements
Forest allows also unlock achievements and medals as you use the app, which helps the community that uses it to motivate yourself to keep planting trees. Achievements such as three days in a row planting healthy trees, total concentration time equivalent to thirty days, or sharing Forest content at least ten times. The achievements will help you get coins to have a much more varied forest and unlock new species for the application.
Extensions
Forest also has extensions that allow you to synchronize the application with Google Chrome and Firefox so it can help you telecommute or in the study. What it does is that it will only allow you to open those websites that are useful to you or you can remove websites that waste time. If you visit them, your tree will die.
