The Tech Tips Team is back, and before we dive into our next blog post, we wanted to extend a warm welcome to the Academic Success Centre for sharing some of the tech resources available for students!

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming! This week we’d like to talk about something we all struggle with at some level – do you need help with staying on task?  Do you get anxiety thinking about deadlines or due dates? Wonder if you are working on the right task at the right time? Or need a little extra motivation when it comes to completing your schoolwork?

You are not the only one! Students these days have more demands and obligations on their shoulders than ever before, and sometimes even deciding what to do can be the biggest hurdle.

So what’s the solution? Well, do you like video games? Or trees? (Yes, we’re still in the same blog post…)

Forest is a fun app built off of the Pomodoro Technique. The Pom-oh-door-oh-what?… The Paa-muh-daw-row Technique. This technique structures your time into smaller chunks of work and break periods, with the thought that it is easier to focus for a short period of time, rather than a longer period of time. Knowing at the end of that work cycle you get a break, also helps motivate you to stay on task during the work cycle. It can be less overwhelming to break your day into short work cycles and stack them on top of one another, than to think about working all day long. The goal is for solid focused work, even in short periods – it’s the quality of your work that matters, not necessarily the quantity (amount of time).

…and if that didn’t sound good enough on its own, let’s throw Forest into this mixture for success.

Forest is an app available for both android and iOS, as well as a web extension, that takes the Pomodoro Technique, and gamifies it! When you start a work cycle, you plant a seed. As your work cycle progresses, your seed grows. If you successfully complete your work cycle, your tree is planted into your (wait for it) Forest! The more successful work cycles you complete, the more trees you plant, the more trees you plant, the more coins you get, which can be used to buy different tree seeds to plant.

Not into growing a digital forest, but like the idea behind the app? What if we told you that instead of using your coins to buy different tree seeds, that you could spend those coins to plant real trees?!?! Now not only are you using the Pomodoro Technique to help motivate you and keep you on track, but you’re having fun while doing it, and making a positive impact in the real world!

Forest has both freemium and premium platforms available, meaning you can give it a try before you spend any of your hard-earned (real-world) coins on it!
Webpage: Forest, Chrome Web Extension
Webpage: Forest, App Store Download
Webpage: Forest, PlayStore Download

Note: this will be our last Tech Tips blog post for the 2022 year. Thank you to all who have read and supported the blog!