5 Apps To Help You Avoid Distractions, Become More Productive

Although frequently accused of distracting students from study and employees from work, mobile and web applications can do the opposite as well. Often, that is by encouraging you to stay away from the very devices you are wasting your precious time on. A range of apps now available are aimed at reducing stress, improving focus, helping with mood and sleep, all of which is calculated to enhance productivity.

Forest App

Forest app is designed to help you stay focused. Launched in 2014, it is a mobile app that helps you stay away from smartphones. It does so by making you plant a virtual tree which grows faster while you’re away from the phone (and other apps). If you do well enough, you earn coins that lead to planting of actual trees in five African countries – Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, and Tanzania – the app’s description claims. However, if you fail to meet your target and disappoint the Forest App, it gently shames you.

The application is available on Android, ipadOS, iOS, as a browser extension for Chrome and an add-on for Firefox. According to Forbes, Forest app is used across 130 countries and has 6 million users.

Forest App

Focus Booster

This is a desktop app which uses the Pomodoro technique. A timer breaks the work period into 25-minute intervals with five-minute breaks in between.

The app allows the user to keep track of time and also download performance reports from the Focus Booster dashboard. The report typically consists of the number of 25-minute packets utilised. If the app is paused midway through the stint, it resets the clock again to run for 25 minutes. This discourages the user from stepping away before the 25 minutes are up. Users can select a date range to view the report for those dates.

Also read,

• Self-Care Tips To Feel Happy And Rejuvenated

Focus Booster

Stay Focused

Stay focus allows users to avoid wasting time on other applications and social media by blocking them. However, it requires the user to do a spot of honest self-appraisal before selecting the apps for blocking. Users can set the duration for which the apps are to be blocked.

If you open a blocked app – say, Facebook or Candy Crush – Stay Focused will remind you to do just that by presenting a notification window over the app’s interface. The notification exhorts you to quit wasting time and focus on goals and you can’t get rid of the lecture until it is permitted by the Stay Focused app. Clearly, it’s main strategy is to annoy you into giving up distracting apps on phones.

Stay Focused was designed by Innoxapps.

Stay Focused

Balance

Balance is a meditation app that has mainly four sets of goals for users to pick from. It helps reduce stress, improve sleep, increase focus, and improve mood. Users can select all the goals or only what they require.

Students experiencing sleep issues, stress, mood changes and focus issues can try this out. Once the application is installed the user has to answer a few questions which allows personalisation of the meditation plan. The programmes are created based on the user’s goals, experience, preference and age.

A convenient time can be selected for meditation and a voiceover gives instructions.

The app was developed by Elevate Labs.

Balance App

Cold Shower Therapy

The Cold Shower Therapy aims to help start a new activity or build a new habit that is difficult by encouraging you to take quite literal cold showers as a challenge.

“Cold shower therapy” is based on the principle that the excuses you make to avoid cold showers are akin to the ones made to avoid other challenges. If you can take a cold shower, you can overcome the other challenges as well.

The users can schedule their showers and track how many showers they have completed. Students aiming to sit for a major exam can pick a task, set a target 30 days ahead, take a five-minute cold shower every day for 30 days until the task is completed and the target achieved.

The publisher of the Cold Shower Therapy app is Impossible X LLC.

Cold Shower Therapy