11: Review: Forest app for Android and Apple Mindful Tech Coach

Today I'm reviewing an app for Android and Apple devices called Forest, which is a great example of the growing range of apps that try to change your tech habits and give you more mindfulness and less screentime. On a related note, I was at the checkout line at the pharmacy the other day and I picked up this Time Magazine special edition about Mindfulness, and it has two good articles about digital distraction and mindfulness. The first one called "Devices Mess with Your Brain," by Markham Heid, quotes MIT neuroscience professor Earl Miller on what's called the "switch cost" to your brain of of changing your focus. And the second article, called "...So give yourself an I-Break" by Ellen Seidman, actually has a lot to do with our app review today. One of Seidman's recommendations is what she calls getting a "digital babysitter," and that's one way to describe what apps like Forest can do for you.
As we talked about in my previous podcast episode, on unplugging from Facebook, unplugging from your your usual smartphone habits can take many forms, and if you want to design your own approach, that episode, plus the article 16 Steps to Turn Your Scattered Smartphone into a Mindfulness Machine, can help you use your existing apps and phone settings to help you unplug. But it can help to not reinvent the wheel, and instead have an app that is designed to help do the work of unplugging for you--and it does one of the fundamental things I recommend in the Mindfulness Machine article, which is to use your phone as a focus timer.
But what is the Forest App exactly? At one level, it's a smartphone game. But unlike Angry Birds or Candy Crush, Forest a game you play by successfully staying off of your phone. And at another level it's a tool for timing and measuring your ability to stay off your phone for focused blocks of time.

The app is called Forest because the game is to plant a virtual tree, that takes, for example, ten minutes to grow, and as long as you can stay off your phone long enough, the tree will finish growing and be added to your on-screen forest for today, but if you get back on your phone too fast, the tree withers and dies.
Now to tell you a little more about what I like about this app, let me explain what you can do with it before, during, and after your focused unplugging time.
Before you unplug, the app has a start screen with a button that will plant your tree, and that will start a timer, which you can set for anything from ten minutes to two hours.
Next, during the unplugging,Once you plant the tree, the app moves to push you away from your phone. One of my favorite features is how, while the work timer counts down and the tree grows on-screen, the app also flashes messages to you on-screen, like "stop phubbing!" and " and go back to your work!" And in the paid version of the app, you can even write your own custom motivational messages to yell at yourself.
The other important feature that Forest offers while you're focusing is audio to listen to while you're focusing. Fittingly for Forest app, it includes a rainforest sounds loop, and as you plan more trees, you can earn access to to additional ambient sounds like a Paris Café. And as someone who listens to a lot of music and podcasts on my phone too, I appreciated that I could also listen to audio on other apps while planting a tree, as long as I didn't exit the app to do so.
And so as I'm sure you're guessing, the tree-planting countdown can end in one of two ways. Either you stay off your phone until the app tells you that your tree has finished growing,, or, you jump back on your phone too early, and your tree dies a tragic early death. Either way, the app will give you credit for the amount of time you stayed focused, and add the living or dead tree to your on-screen forest for the day. I also like how you can tag your focused time blocks with what you were doing, and you can then see graphs day-by-day of what you were focused on and for how lo