I have a confession to make. I get addicted to achieving points, rewards, and rankings on iPhone games. Most people get addicted to one game or other at some point. We all crave the validation of a little gold star, of being told we've just levelled up! Earned a medal! Found a rare golden doubloon! Received 100 gold stars! And apps give you gold stars for everything. It feels good to receive a gold star. To be told you've accomplished something. To be able to see proof ofyour achievements. It's just a fact of human nature.
What makes those phone apps even more addicted is that in real life, people rarely hand out gold stars. You don't get a medal for doing the dishes every day for a week straight. There's no sense of achievement in spending all day rewriting a sentence, only to decide the best thing to do is cut it entirely.
Most of the work we do in our daily lives goes completely unsung.
So when we download a phone app and it gives us heaps of gold stars, even the best of us can become a wee bit obsessed.
Recently, I became addicted to a game called.... Tap Tap Fish.
I downloaded the app while looking for a virtual aquarium to distract a fussy baby. The baby, of course, didn't care. But I had an empty aquarium waiting to be filled with fish. And if I levelled up enough? A WHALE.
I wanted a whale.
To get the whale, I had to earn vitality. Vitality were this game's version of a gold star. You earn 'vitality' in the game by tapping on the screen. Collect enough 'vitality' and you can buy a fish. You can watch ads to earn extra vitality, gems, pearls, etc. which will all help you buy more fish. Buy more fish, earn more vitality. Earn enough, and... whale.
You get the picture.
Reader, I have not yet earned a whale. Tracking my 'achievements' however, I was able to see that in 12 days of using the app I:
- 'tapped' my phone over 500k times
- watched 400 30 second ads
- spent well over 12 hours with the app open (you get extra vitality if you spend an hour on the app each day!)
I spent every spare minute to earn more vitality, earn more fish, work towards the whale.
That false sense of achievement made me feel good. All of the levels and pearls and gems and points I earned along the way made me feel like I was accomplishing something.
And you see, I knew the app was doing this to me purposefully. It knew I craved gold stars. It knew I would want a whale. It was making me feel good so I would watch 400 30 second ads in the pursuit of it all. That's the entire reason phone games exist.
Like the honourable Cap. Holt, I knew that earning a whale was a meaningless goal. I didn't really care. It made me feel good, but it couldn't actually make me happy. I knew there were much better things I could be doing with my time.
So, reader, I decided to see if I could use an app's ability to reward to actually accomplish real goals.
I downloaded Forest.
Forest is an app that rewards you for staying off your phone. Every day, you're presented with an empty plot of land. Your goal is to fill that land with trees. You can plant a tree by setting an amount of time, and not leaving the 'planting' screen for that period. If you do leave the screen, your tree dies. As you work throughout the day, you plant more trees and fill that day's forest.
For each tree you plant, you earn gold coins that can either be spent on fancy virtual trees or real trees planted through a charity. You get extra gold coins for hitting various checkpoints (working for a total number of hours, planting trees a certain number of days in a row, etc.)
You can tag your task for each tree you plant. For example, I'm planting a tree right now tagged with 'blogging.' Earlier this morning, I planted two 'reading' trees. This afternoon, I'm going to work on some 'manuscript' trees. The app lets you view your 'stats' to see how much time you spend on your respective tasks so you can better visualise how you spend your 'productive' hours.
Not only does this app give you all of the good feelings of a phone game, but it actually helps you work. It keeps you from getting distracted by all of the otherapps on your phone. Every time you reflexively pick up your phone to check twitter/Facebook/WhatsApp/whatever, you're reminded that you have **:** minutes left in this working session.
As a bonus, there's even a chrome extension that lets you blacklist or whitelist certain websites so that while working, you can check your email, but not Buzzfeed.
You can block both your phone and computer at the same time.
This is not a product placement, I just honestly LOVE THIS APP.
I have the exact same feelings I felt towards Tap Tap Fish, except now, all of my coins and trees and goals represent time I've spent doing tasks that are important to me. Reading. Writing. Working. That sense of accomplishment is earned.
Now that my blogging tree has been planted, I'm going to run off for a coffee break before I start a manuscript tree.
xx Julia