Why I Body Double with Strangers Around the World (and You Might Want To Also)
A quick disclosure: nobody is paying me to write this. I just think this is one of the best tools available to ADHD and neurodivergent people, and I want to shout it from the rooftops.
The tool is called Focusmate. I signed up for it last August and have been using it heavily since late January. I want to tell you why I love it, not just because it is fun (it is), but because it solves a problem that a lot of my coaching clients describe to me almost word for word.
The problem Focusmate solves
A lot of ADHD and neurodivergent people are great at responding to external demands. Someone needs something from us, there is a hard deadline, the house is on fire (figuratively, I hope). We tend to be good at rising to the occasion. What is much harder is the stuff with no external signal attached to it. The laundry that has been sitting there for three days. The project with a deadline that is technically next month. The task that matters to us but no one else cares about.
In coaching, this is often one of the first things we talk about: initiating and sustaining focus on low-urgency tasks. For a lot of ADHD people, this is a challenge, and it has nothing to do with willpower. It’s simply an executive function difference. Once we have that awareness, the next question is: what kind of structure or support would actually help? For many people, Focusmate, a low-cost, virtual body-doubling service, has become a real answer.
What body doubling actually is
If you are new to the term, body doubling is simply doing a task alongside another person, in person or virtually, where their presence helps you start and stay with something you might otherwise avoid or drift away from. The other person does not coach you or check your work. They are just there, working alongside you, and something about that shared presence makes the task easier to begin and easier to stick with.
Focusmate is body doubling built into an app. You book a session (25, 50, or 75 minutes), you get matched with another person, you both say what you’re working on, and you work, on camera, mics muted, alongside each other for the duration of the session. A sound alerts you to the end of the session and you come back on mic to share how it went and celebrate your success with your partner. It’s very simple.
How it actually helps my brain
For me, body doubling touches three of the executive functions that give me trouble.
Self-Activation, which is the getting-started function. Knowing my Focusmate partner is depending on me gets me going in a way a to-do list never has.
Working Memory, the remembering what I’m doing function. Stating my goal out loud at the start of a session creates a kind of external anchor. I am less likely to drift three tabs deep into something unrelated when I have already said, out loud, to a person, what I am doing for the next 50 minutes.
Emotional Self-Control, the managing-overwhelm function. There is something calming about simply not being alone with a task that feels hard. The presence of another person, even a stranger, even silently, takes some of the emotional charge out of it.
What a session actually looks like
My go-to is the 50-minute session. I like starting at the top of the hour, working for 50 minutes, and then having a built-in 10-minute break before the next one starts. I’m 49, and get stiff if I sit too long, especially when I am in hyperfocus and would otherwise not notice. That 10-minute break is my body’s reminder to get up. Sometimes I throw in a load of laundry. Sometimes I hop on the treadmill for five or eight minutes. Sometimes I get water or a snack. It also functions as a built-in cap on screwing-around time. The break has a hard end, so there is no scrolling spiral; there is just enough time to do one small thing and come back.
I set a Time Timer (another tool I swear by for ADHD brains) with the ringer turned on for those 10 minutes, because left to my own devices I’ll forget what I’m doing and lose track of time entirely. The timer does the remembering so I don’t have to.
Most of my sessions, we get straight to work after the greeting and task descriptions, but sometimes I chat a little with my partner first. I have a lot of plants and natural light in the background (I care a lot about having a workspace that feels calm and visually appealing). And more than half the people I am paired with comment on how much they love my plants or their surprise when my dog moves and they realize the background isn’t fake. One person told me my background was “giving Studio Ghibli,” which was such a nice compliment. These little interactions always make me happy.
The part that still amazes me
Focusmate is available 24/7, worldwide, which means there is always someone online no matter when you sit down to work. I have been matched with people in Australia, Japan, China, the Middle East, South Africa, Monaco, all over Europe and South America, and of course across Canada and the US. (Obviously, it pairs me with English speakers, but it works for many languages.) Sometimes we chat briefly about where we each are. It’s obvious, a lot of the time, that the person on the other side of the screen is also using this as ADHD support, and the community is lovely. I have never been matched with someone I didn’t like.
People use it for all kinds of things, not just desk work. I have shared a session with someone meditating, someone doing a fitness routine, someone folding laundry, someone wrapping presents. Watching that range reminds me, every time, that none of us are alone in having to do a range of daily tasks, often repetitive and mundane.
The range of people is part of what makes it work. I have been paired with college students cramming for exams, retirees working on personal projects, teachers grading papers after school hours, entrepreneurs building their businesses, and office workers tackling the parts of their job that do not come with a built-in deadline. ADHD and neurodivergence show up at every age and in every kind of work, and Focusmate seems to have found all of us.
I also love that you do not need to plan ahead. When people first hear about Focusmate, they often assume they need to schedule sessions in advance, which immediately triggers an executive function warning in their brains. But you don’t have to plan. My typical practice is to sit down at my desk, book the soonest available session, and then keep booking the next one right after, one after another, for as long as I want to work. For an ADHD brain that does not always plan in advance, that flexibility matters. The structure is there the moment you decide you want it. You can also favorite people you click with, so you will sometimes see a familiar face, which is a nice bonus. Most chitchat is brief, a minute or two, and then everyone gets to work. People are very respectful of that boundary.
One more thing, just for fun
I will admit that I have also turned this into a small personal game. I track my total session count against the number of days since I joined, with a goal of averaging at least one session per day. Some days I do six. Some days, when I am out doing in-person organizing work, I do none. The number moves, I check it, I feel a small hit of motivation to close the gap. It’s a completely made-up goal that means nothing to anyone but me, and it works anyway. I suspect this kind of self-made gamification will resonate with other neurodivergent readers; sometimes the most effective motivation system is the slightly silly one you build yourself.
If you have been looking for a low-stakes way to bring more structure into your work, or you are simply tired of trying to white-knuckle your way through tasks that have no built-in urgency, I would encourage you to try it. It costs very little for what it gives you, and it might just become one of your favorite parts of the day, the way it has become one of mine.
Why I’m telling you this
If you are an ADHD or otherwise neurodivergent person who is trying to understand and work with your own brain rather than against it, that is exactly what coaching with me is about. Some things are just harder for our brains, and once we understand the specific shape of that challenge, we can go looking for the solution that actually fits. Focusmate will not be the answer for everyone. But it is one example of the kind of support that exists, and there are thousands of variations out there worth exploring.
