A Forest app alternative for your laptop

Forest is one of the best-loved focus apps there is, and for good reason. You plant a tree, set a timer, and if you leave the app before the time is up, the tree dies. It turns "do not check the phone" into something you can see. Millions of students use it. This page is not an argument against Forest. It is about one thing it cannot fix, and what to use instead if that thing is your problem.

The catch: the timer is on the phone

To keep your tree alive, Forest needs the phone next to you with the app open. So for the whole session the phone is on the desk, in view, a hand's reach away. The notifications are hidden, but the object is there.

Whether a phone on the desk costs you attention even when you ignore it is still debated. The best-known study, Ward and colleagues in 2017, found that people did worst on memory tests with the phone on the desk and best with it in another room. Later, larger replications found a smaller effect or none. What nobody disputes is simpler: a phone you cannot reach cannot interrupt you, and a phone you are watching a tree on is always within reach.

The same idea, off the phone

If you work on a laptop anyway, the timer can live there. That is all Kiri is: a focus timer that runs in the browser on your laptop and refuses to run on phones. Type what the block is for, pick 25, 50 or 90 minutes, press Space. The countdown sits in the tab title, a chime marks the end, and the phone can go in the kitchen.

Instead of a tree, Kiri gives you sound: long recordings of rain, a café, a forest, the sea, made from real field recordings that do not loop. For many people the sound does the job the tree does, which is to make "I am working now" feel like a place you are in.

Where Forest is still the better choice

• You study on paper. If your work is a textbook and a notebook, a laptop timer means a laptop open on the desk, which is its own distraction. A phone in Forest, face up and locked, may be the lesser evil.
• The game is what keeps you going. Growing a forest over weeks, and Forest's real-tree planting partnership, are genuinely motivating. Kiri has a streak and nothing more.
• You want website blocking. Forest's browser extension can kill your tree when you open a blocked site. Kiri does not block anything; it only times and plays sound.

And on price: Forest's core app is a one-time purchase on iPhone, with an optional subscription on top. Kiri's free tier covers the timer, rain and brown noise, and the rest is a single payment, no subscription.

Try the other room

The simplest test costs nothing. Tomorrow, run one block with Forest on the desk and one with the phone in another room and the timer above running on your laptop. Write down after each how many times you thought about the phone. Keep whichever wins. If you also want every new tab to open on the timer, there is a Chrome extension for that.