Introduction
Have you seen that video with Mr. Beast planting 20 million trees? Well I’m here to tell you that you can be like him…sort of. Your mind is a forest too, and it needs to be nurtured just like a real forest. Each distracting website you go to slowly poisons your mind, if left unregulated. While productive sites will grow your brain. Forest helps you visualize this and also kinda guilt trip you into staying off the unhealthy stuff, and growing your own virtual forest. Let’s take a look 👇
What Is It?
Forest is a free Chrome extension timer that grows a virtual tree while you stayed focused, and kills it if you open up distracting sites. It’s like a Pomodoro timer, but with guilt and greenery. It’s like Totoro growing that tree with a little dance and magic, but you’re doing with focus and the power of HTML coding.
Start a focus timer, grow a tree as it goes on.
Open a blocked site = your tree dies.
Helps reduce tab hopping and doomscrolling with guilt.
Builds a virtual forest of your focus streaks.
Maybe you can’t fight real deforestation all alone, but you can fight the deforestation of your mind with just a little help from Forest.
How Do You Use It?
Guilt tripping isn’t usually fun. Neither is watching grass grow (thus the saying). But somehow Forest combines the two, and well… two negatives makes a positive.
Install the Chrome extension from the web store.
Go to your extensions and open up Forest.
Make a list for blocklist mode (sites not allowed when the timer starts) or allowlist mode (sites only allowed when the timer starts)
Choose your focus time (10 - 120 mins) and the tree you want to grow.
Hit that start button and watch your pile of dirt sprout a tree.
Do not open blocked sites, or you’ll murder your tree (oh, the agony!)
And then eventually, after several focus sessions, you’ll have your own virtual forest, with each tree having a story of productivity and focus (unless you just started the timer and let it run AFK 💀).
What Does It Replace?
It replaces that desire you have to be Mr. Beast because you want his philanthropic mindset, and totally not his endless wallet (right? 🤨). Jokes aside here’s what Forest does get rid of with it’s unique spin on the boring timer app:
Mindless tab-switching (just close the computer atp 💀).
“Soft” tools that don’t block anything (because you don’t care enough to not turn them off).
Guilt-free distractions (sometimes, it costs something to gain something).
Self-control apps with zero visual feedback.
The main thing is, with Forest, you’ll never want to turn off that timer. Because, you know that if you do, your forest will always have one less tree than it should.