You Will Do It If Somebody Is There

What we learned running body doubling for a month, and what comes back in October

There is a thing you have been meaning to do. You know exactly what it is, it would take an afternoon at most, and it has been sitting at the back of your mind for two weeks, surfacing when you lie down at night and gone again whenever there is time to start it.

Now think about the last time a dull job got done without a fight. Somebody was probably nearby. A partner in the next room, a colleague at the other end of the table, the friend you sat with in the library at nineteen. They were not helping or checking, and nothing about the job or about you had changed.

We ran a version of that every weekday morning in August, our Get Sh*t Done sessions. They are coming back in October, probably within a couple of weeks, built properly this time, and before they do we want to hear from you. Three minutes, and your answers decide how they run. Below is what August looked like from the inside.

This week's worksheet, Your Body Doubling Setup, is the setup: who, when, and the thing you would take to the first one. Free for everyone this week, along with the whole issue.

Why the room works

The name for this is body doubling, which means doing your own thing while somebody else does theirs, at the same time. It is the least impressive idea in ADHD and one of the few that works on the first try.

It has been studied. In 2023 three researchers at UC Santa Cruz surveyed 220 people about it, 193 of them neurodivergent and 139 with ADHD. Over half of them said they were more likely to finish a task while working alongside someone else. What they described was company, less dread at the start, and a mild sense of owing something to a person who was not even watching. One of them called it being accountable to not follow the impulse.

It is common enough that people pay for it. There are companies whose entire business is matching strangers into fifty-minute working slots, and they run the same way ours did: you show up, you say what you are doing, you both work.

Our own numbers come from the first morning we ran one. Sixty-eight people were watching at once. Fifteen posted the thing they had been avoiding, and ten of them said afterward that it moved. We only announced it in our Substack chat and the app, so every one of those sixty-eight found it there.

What we do understand is the piece underneath it. An ADHD brain prices a consequence by how soon it lands, and most of what we have to do carries no consequence until much later, if at all. Nobody notices whether it gets started on Tuesday. A room full of people who watched you type what you were about to do, and who will be there when the timer goes, converts a private task into one where something happens in forty-five minutes.

The other half is quieter and harder to measure. Doing a dull job beside other people is easier than doing it alone, and it has been easier for as long as anyone has been doing dull jobs. Nobody needed a paper for that part.

The objection we hear most is that it should not be necessary. You are a grown adult, the task is small, and needing another person in the room to start a small thing sounds like something you ought to have outgrown. That reaction stops most people trying it, and it rests on the assumption that has never once worked for us: that wanting it enough should be sufficient. Nobody thinks less of you for keeping a calendar in your phone or owning an alarm clock.

None of this requires you to be seen. In our sessions you were a name and a task on a shared screen. Nobody appeared and nobody spoke. You typed what you were about to do, and at the end you typed whether it moved.

Things to try

Whatever the setup, name the task out loud or type it into a chat before you start, and name it exactly: I am renewing the car registration. A task named that precisely has edges you can find, and naming it is the step people skip before deciding body doubling did not work for them.

🥄 Use a recording when nobody is available

There are hours of footage of people working in silence, and it does a surprising amount of the job at two in the afternoon when nobody you know is free. It costs nothing to find out whether it works on you, and if it does, it is the version that is always available.

🥄🥄 Phone a friend who is also doing something

Not a chat. Call somebody who has their own boring job to get through, say what each of you is doing, put the phone down on the side with the call still running, and work. Twenty minutes. The bar for this is much lower than people think, and the friend does not need to have ADHD or to understand why it helps.

🥄🥄🥄 Set up a standing one with a person you know

The strongest version is the same person at the same time every week, because then it stops being a thing you have to decide about each time. Sunday evening, Thursday lunch, whatever is dead space for both of you. Trade what you are working on at the start, work, check in at the end, and keep it to an hour so neither of you starts dreading it. Six weeks of that will do more than any app either of you is going to download, and it costs nothing but the standing appointment.

Coming back in October

We are serious about this one. What these sessions give you is something outside your own head holding the shape of the morning: a start time, a room, other people working at the same moment. The Get Sh*t Done sessions are the first piece of something bigger we are making for Weasel members around exactly that, and we want the next version to be worth your morning.

August was our pilot, and it showed us the first thing to fix. We announced every session in the Substack chat and the app, and most of you read us by email, so plenty of you never knew they were happening. That one is on us.

So before they come back, we are asking. The survey takes about three minutes and works whether or not you ever came to one. It asks what the August mornings were like, what got in the way if you never made one, and what would get you into the next one. Take the three-minute survey. The sooner the answers come in, the sooner the first session goes live.

And if you would rather not wait, the format is simple enough to copy with two friends and a group chat. We would rather you did that than nothing.

This week's Apply It worksheet

Free for everyone this week. You will pick the format most likely to happen, name the one person, choose the task you would take to the first one, and write the sentence you will say at the start.

This, not that

Neurotypical advice: you need more self-discipline.

ADHD version: self-discipline is the thing you have been trying since you were nine. Borrow somebody else's presence for forty-five minutes and watch how much less of it you need.

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