Studying isn’t easy, but there’s one thing I find even harder: staying consistent. No matter how motivated I am at the start of the day, I’ll always find a way to procrastinate or get distracted. That’s exactly why I’ve been on the hunt for an accountability app that actually works, and I finally found one.
Flora Helps You Stay Focused by Planting Trees While You Study
Flora is a habit-tracker app, available on both the App Store and Google Play Store, that doubles as a productivity buddy. It’s the perfect way to stay focused, build consistent study habits, and actually enjoy the process.
It’s built around a simple (and a bit silly) concept: you plant a seed every time you start a focused study session, and as you stay focused on your task, the seed grows into a full-fledged tree.
During this time, you can’t pick up your phone or essentially leave the Flora app (unless you tweak the app’s settings, but that defeats the purpose). Should you pick up your phone mid-session, your growing tree will wither and die.
I know how weird of a concept this is, but it’s been strangely motivating. Seeing a tree die because I got distracted makes me think twice before reaching for my phone, and watching a forest grow over time gives a real sense of accomplishment.
If a fake tree dying isn’t enough to push you to focus, Flora takes it a step further. You can connect it to your payment method, and if you break your focus mid-session, the amount you choose before starting the session is deducted from your account.That money goes toward planting a real tree, thanks to Flora’s partnerships with environmental organizations.
Frankly, I haven’t felt the need to try this option yet, since killing a fake tree gets me to stay on track just fine. But knowing that the app can also use my failure to make a real-world impact by planting actual trees makes it feel even more meaningful.
You Can Plant Trees With Friends Too
For the longest time, I thought I studied best when I was locked up in my room, studying alone. But over time, I realized I get sidetracked more often than I’d like. Before I know it, I’ve picked up my phone mid-study session and somehow spent two hours watching TikToks and talking to my friends. For a while, my friends and I started studying together on video calls.
Though that worked initially, eventually we all got a little too comfortable, and our “study breaks” started stretching much longer than intended. I then switched over to watching Study with Me streams on YouTube, hoping that the silent accountability of watching someone else study in real time would keep me focused. That was one of the smartest moves I could’ve made, and it still helps me stay focused to this day. But it sometimes gets a bit boring, and I miss the feeling of studying with my friends.
That’s where Flora comes in. It lets me combine the best of both worlds: having the accountability of studying alongside others while still staying fully focused. Just like I can plant trees when I’m studying on my own, I can also add friends to the app, and we can collectively plant trees and focus.
Here’s the interesting bit though: if anyone in the session gets distracted and ends up killing a tree, everyone else in the session gets notified. I’ve always been a very competitive person, so knowing someone would know if I got distracted instantly keeps me on track. Flora adds a playful, oddly motivating pressure that makes me want to focus even more, and it’s one of the reasons why I absolutely love it.
You Can Track Your Studying Statistics (and Your Friends’ Too)
I track every single thing. I use an AI-powered scheduling tool called Reclaim alongside Google Calendar simply to see how many hours I spend working and on my tasks, to see how consistent I really am and where I might be losing time.
One more reason why I love Flora is that it lets me track all my study sessions and visualize my progress over time. All the trees you grow are displayed in a vibrant, virtual forest that makes your progress easy to see at a glance. Flora also lets you view daily, weekly, or monthly summaries of your study sessions.
Once you add your friends, you can see how many hours they’ve focused too. Seeing my friends have studied a lot more than I have is sometimes all the motivation I need to buckle down and really focus!
Flora is simply one of the best apps I’ve found for staying focused. Whether you’re studying alone or with your entire friend group, it turns boring productivity sessions into something a bit more engaging and competitive.
