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Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome, overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merten. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Coffee Powered Systems. Today is Tuesday, that means it's Tuesday, where I give you the skinny on an app or a tool that could help your personal productivity.

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Today, I am talking about the Forest app. This is a tip for my people who get distracted and people who have a hard time staying focused when they're in the middle of doing a task. So what is Forest? Forest is an app that helps you stay focused on the important things in life. OK, so this is for you. If you like to play games, if you like to gamify your life or different parts of your life, if you're one of those that searches the App Store looking for things that are fun and helps motivate you, Forest might be the thing to help you stay focused while you're doing those important tasks.

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So Forest is a very simple concept.

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You plant a tree, your tree grows while you focus on your work. And if you leave the app, your tree dies.

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So let's say you want to focus on writing a blog post for 30 minutes.

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You set your timer for 30 minutes, you choose a tree. There are different types of trees and fauna that you can choose from. You press start on your timer while you focus for 30 minutes.

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You leave the phone alone, you don't pick it up, you don't exit the app. And when you are done with your timer, you've got a beautiful tree which goes into a virtual forest. Of course, if you decide to leave the app or you get distracted or you want to pick up Facebook, decide you want to stop for whatever reason, your tree dies and you've lost that focus time.

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So basically it motivates you to stay in the app and stay with your task so that you do finish and your tree grows. When you are done with all of these tasks and all of these focus sessions, you end up with a beautiful forest with different kinds of trees and fauna to look at.

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There's also another catch. When you complete your focus time sessions, you get coins. So let's say you focus for twenty five minutes, you get twenty five coins.

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After you've received a certain amount of coins, those coins can be taken to their quote unquote tree store where you can purchase real trees. They've partnered with an organization called Trees for the Future and you can then trade in your productivity coins to plant real trees. Each user can plant up to five trees. They will do different promotions during the time of the year if you've already exceeded your quota.

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But it's still a very cool motivational tool. And I think that's super awesome.

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If you're into the environment, if you're looking for something that you can do, basically just still doing your work and then contributing to the environment.

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This is perfect. Also similar to the forest app from the same makers of Forest. They have Flora and Flora is basically Forest with friends. You know, think about this as if you're in a study group having a family game night or movie night or you just want to sit down and have a conversation with people. Everybody turn on flora or forest and plant a tree with flora.

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Everyone's planting a tree in the same forest, in the same garden. So if anyone leaves the app, then the tree dies. If you are the kind of person that needs a little bit more accountability, then Flora is going to be the one for you, because now you are also helping other people and you're relying on each other to keep the plants alive. Flora also has a real money incentive so you can actually attach money to your timer. So if you pledge let's say you pledge five dollars during your focus session, once you finish your focus session, all good.

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If you don't finish your focus session, then you actually have to pay that real five dollars towards the price of planting a real tree.

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If you tend to be a pretty disciplined person and can do things on your own, start with Forest if you need a little bit more motivation and push where you want some accountability, either with friends or with real money, go with Flora.

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All right. So I will leave the links to both of those down in the show notes so you can grab those and try those out today. Both apps are free, but they do have some in app purchases if you want to do upgrades or anything like that.

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So go check out Forest and Flora today and get focused. All right. That is my tip for today. I will see you next time.

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Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the show, notes are on the website at Miranda Merten Dot com. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with another bestie who would love it, too. And join me here next time.