SleepTown

I genuinely don’t even know if I had this regular of a sleep schedule when I was a kid. I have ADHD and would regularly spend until four in the morning researching whatever that week’s new interest was on my phone instead of sleeping. The novelty of getting new buildings, the frustration of a house collapsing, and the desire to keep consistent so I have the funds to configure new areas of my town are all strong enough to keep me from blowing it off, which is a pretty huge feat. Also, when I did hit a patch of not using it for awhile, I discovered the Circles function, and having friends build projects with me gave me the added element of public accountability. The only fundamental way this app could be better would be if you were somehow able to download it onto other devices and your desktop so that you can’t hop from your phone to somewhere else, but also, like, an app can’t actually be a full adult for you, so 🤷🏼‍♀️. (That said, developers, if you could give the option to edit the sleep goals for Circles groups every couple of weeks in case of slight schedule changes in the group, I would love you forever.) Anyway, it’s an incredible app, and my mental and physical health are measurably better for it.

Alright so it’s not a game, nor will it require time away from anything. I was first brought onto SleepTown by way of Forest which has changed the way I use my iPhone for the better! SleepTown has not only surpassed my expectations but believe or not I am going to bed on time and not spending time on my iPhone (how simple that may sound I know there are millions of us who can’t due to the phone addiction) then waking up to a surprisingly building that provides me with a weird satisfaction that I slept and obtained a building for my town. Look, this is probably not for anyone who could give a rip about spending countless hours on their phones while in bed or could care less about sleep (if this is you... life catches up), but if you are in the class of “I care about the quality of sleep and want to break away from giving my attention to a device that is a time sucking, data hog, irrelevant piece of metal and plastic”... then I would suggest SleepTown.

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It’s a nice app but it’s so strict, if you miss by a couple minutes, even if you still get to bed in roughly the same time, the building will be destroyed. Another thing I don’t like is that once you missed my sleeping time that’s it, you failed the night and there’s nothing else you can do. But really, even if I missed my sleeping time by hours, it still helps to just click “build” and put down the phone when I do decide to sleep. I want to use this app for helping me get away from my phone, and i still want to use this feature even if I did miss my sleeping time. But right now “missing you sleeping time” is just the end of the story. I don’t even want to open this app after not being able to build a single house for three days. There’re tracking apps more forgiving rewarding and helpful than this one. ————————— What I think might help is to add a period in which you want to go to bed, then a deadline by which you have to get off your phone. Say you want to sleep at 10pm, it may help to give you a period between 9:30 to 10:30 in which you can hit sleep and start building the house, but still allow you to have some flexibility, say I can still reply to a text at 10:05. But then by 10:30 is the hard deadline after which the house will be destroyed if you look at your phone again.

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So there are definitely things about this app that I like! It’s very cute and a fun way to incentivize not being on your phone before bed. I have the sister app, Forest, for concentration and staying off my phone during the day and that one is perfect in my mind! But this one still needs some changes to be perfect in my mind. I’ve seen a few other reviews suggest having a sleep time window and a wake up window so you don’t automatically fail if you’re off by 15 or 30 minutes, which I agree would be really nice. The strictness of destroying your building if you leave after you decide to go to sleep is effective and I think that should stay, but there definitely needs to be a 30 minute cushion between sleep time and wake up time. My only other complaint is the days off feature. I’ve selected Saturday and Sunday as my days off since that’s when I get to stay up later and sleep in later, but I still get notifications on those days to go to bed in 30 minutes and missing those days still breaks my streak. I hope that some improvements can be made cause I really want to like this app!! It’s just hard to build a sleep habit when it won’t give you weekends or any leeway.

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I’m really bad at staying on my phone when I’m in bed so an app like this is really helpful in helping build a habit. However, there are a few things that really make it hard for me to like this app. I really enjoy the “game” aspect of it and how it’s a challenge because it really incentivizes me, but it’s just not realistic to check-in when I go to bed every single time. For example, tonight I missed going to bed by 1 minute and that automatically constitutes as a failure. The problem with this is that now I don’t have an incentive to not be on my phone. I could just move my sleep time to 11pm, but that defeats the purpose of it. While ideally my sleep time is 10:30pm, it’s just not realistic for me to go to bed at exactly that time and sometimes it’s just a matter of forgetting to check in (even with the notification). I would like there to be an option for a “smaller” incentive if you miss your bedtime goal but still don’t want to use your phone at night. i.e. maybe it should count towards half a building or something similar. Unfortunately, this app just isn’t working completely for me at this time but I will keep on using it with the hope it will help.