letswritesomenovels:The Forest Productivity AppForest is an app that rewards you for staying off you
letswritesomenovels:The Forest Productivity AppForest is an app that rewards you for staying off your phone and staying productive. Every day, you’re presented with an empty plot of land. Your goal is to fill that land with trees. You can plant a tree by setting an amount of time, and not leaving the ‘planting’ screen for that period. If you do leave the screen, your tree dies. As you work throughout the day, you plant more trees and fill that day’s forest.There are a few things I adore about this app.The Trees ThemselvesThe trees are a physical manifestation of all of the time you’ve spent doing things that are important to you. I’m recommending this app to writers because it’s a great way to 1. track your writing time and 2. limit distractions while writing. But you can use it to do the same thing with reading, studying, exercising, meditating, et cetera.Like writing, there are many activities where the time spent on them is more important than the important than the ultimate product. It doesn’t matter that you only wrote one sentence today. What matters is that you dedicated three hours of your day honing your craft, and that even though it was difficult, you didn’t give up.The trees place a value on that time. They make the time the product. So if you end up deleting that sentence, the trees are proof that you worked on it and that time was time well spent.The RewardsThis app turns working into a game.Like any good phone game, you get gold coins and rewards and there are things you can buy with them. For each tree you plant, you earn gold coins that can either be spent on fancy virtual trees or real trees planted through a charity.You get extra gold coins for hitting various checkpoints (working for a total number of hours, planting trees a certain number of days in a row, etc.)These are great additional sources of motivation for when you really want to spend the day binging that new Netflix show, but you’re so close to being able to afford that cat-shaped tree, you might as well get an hour of work in.Limited DistractionsThe app’s main ‘thing’ is that if you close the planting screen before the time period you’ve set yourself is up, your tree DIES. If you try to open another app, you don’t get your tree.A lot of the time when I write, I open apps reflexively. My brain is straining to figure out this plot hole and suddenly I’m scrolling through Twitter, without any conscious intent.With this app, that reflex is blocked. Every time you reflexively pick up your phone to check twitter/facebook/whatsapp/whatever, you’re reminded that you have **:** minutes left in this session.As a bonus, there’s even a chrome extension that lets you blacklist or whitelist certain websites so that while working, you can check your email or an online thesaurus or wikipedia, but not Buzzfeed or Tumblr.You can block both your phone and computer at the same time.This is not a product placement, I just honestly LOVE THIS APP.Task TagsYou can tag your task for each tree you plant. For example, I’m planting a tree right now tagged with ‘blogging.’ Earlier this morning, I planted two 'reading’ trees. This afternoon, I’m going to work on some 'manuscript’ trees. The app lets you view your 'stats’ to see how much time you spend on your respective tasks so you can better visualise how you spend your 'focused’ hours.Customisable InspirationYou can add your own inspirational quotes, so that every time you check the phone and you still have that long left, you also get a little nugget of inspiration to help you through.It’s SocialYou can add Facebook friends on the app and see if your friends have been productive today. If you have a writing group, or a writing buddy, this added touch of (friendly) competition can be an additional motivator. CostsThe app costs $1.99 in the ios app store. In the google play store a limited version is free and a ‘pro’ version is $1.99, but its features are a little different than the ios version. The chrome add-on is free, but needs to sync with your phone log-in to store your stats.Whatever version you try, I promise the $2 are worth it.This post is a couple of years old, but I want to re-blog it because I’ve been using it to get me out of a writing rut and it’s working so well. Getting a visualization of the effort I’ve been putting into my work (and not the results–or lack of them) has been a great method of introducing writing back into my daily routine. Using it in coordination with the monthly writing tracker I made last year and a comfortable goal (10,000 a month/ a little over 2,000 a week), writing has felt easier than it has in a long time. Here’s the little forest I’ve managed so far (representing 4hrs and 40min of writing!): Also, I thought I’d share some of the quotes I added as my customizable inspiration:A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit. — Richard BachIdeas are cheap. It’s the execution that is all important. — George R.R. MartinIf you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter. — Dan PoynterI am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am. — Jane AustenThe first draft is you telling yourself the story — Terry PratchettAnyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right. — Amy JoyNovels aren’t written by muses who come down through the ceiling and shoot magic through your fingers. Time + Work = Novel ― Stephanie Perkins A bad idea on paper is better than a blank sheet of paper and a mythical piece of brilliance. — UnknownThere are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. — Somerset MaughamYou miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. - Wayne Gretzky — Michael Scottand finally… The first draft of everything is shit. — Ernest Hemingway -- source link