Come study with me: How a virtual buddy might help you get things done

It’s no secret that we live in an age of near-constant digital distractions. Between texts, direct messages, push alerts and other diversions and interruptions, it can be really hard to focus and get stuff done.

However, some folks are using their digital devices to increase their focus and productivity — borrowing a technique often used by people with ADHD. Real-time videos of people studying, working or cleaning are getting tens of millions of views.

Back when Jen Simon of South Orange, N.J., was a teenager, she and her sister both struggled with getting things done.

“My mom figured out my sister had undiagnosed ADHD,” Simon says, “and she figured out some hacks — before they were called hacks — to work with my sister. When she had to do something like clean her room or put away her clothes or whatever it was, my mom would sit with her. She would sit with me often too.”

A few months back, Simon found herself with a load of paperwork she had been putting off. She recalled her mom’s technique and put out a call on Facebook asking for a friend or two to do the same: just come sit with her as she tackled her mission.

It was then that Simon learned that her mom’s old hack now has a name: body doubling. “It works really well for me,” Simon says. She now uses it with her own kids too.

The magic of another person’s presence

Experts say that body doubling is a really effective technique. Even if someone is just sitting nearby doing their own thing while we are working, it seems to spark us into action.

Dr. Edward Hallowell is a psychiatrist and the author of more than 20 books, many of them about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

“People with ADHD find body doubling unusually helpful because we — I have the condition myself — we respond magically to the presence of another person,” he says. “Just having another person nearby activates a kind of attention, imagination, creativity, that is dormant when we’re all by ourselves, usually.”

Body doubling has become wildly popular among folks with ADHD and those who struggle with what professionals call “executive functioning” — the many mental steps we all go through to plan, focus on tasks and accomplish our goals.

(According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 7 million children in the U.S. between the ages of 3 and 17 had been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2022; a global study published in 2023 estimates that about 3% of adults worldwide live with ADHD.)

Author Jessica McCabe, creator of the popular YouTube channel How to ADHD.

Anastasia Tsioulcas/NPR

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Author Jessica McCabe runs a popular YouTube channel called How to ADHD. She also calls body doubling an effective strategy.

For example, McCabe says, “I stayed with a friend who has ADHD and who was really struggling to clean her house. So we played a game. I would hold up a couple of items, and she was the one who had to decide where it would go. But I would give her choices: ‘Should this go in the kitchen, under the sink? Should this go in your bedroom, in a drawer? Should it go on top of my head?’”

It was very playful, McCabe says, but it still helped her friend break things down.

“Before, she was really overwhelmed at the prospect of trying to figure out where things went,” McCabe observes, “because there were just too many cognitive steps. Splitting that cognitive load can be incredibly helpful and make tasks that were a real challenge easy for us.”

McCabe says this is active body doubling — having someone participate in your task. But there’s passive body doubling too — like Simon’s mom sitting with her. In a funny way, many of us have practiced this for years. Maybe you go to a coffee shop to get some work done, or you go to a library to study: All those people sitting around you in those public spaces are kind of unwitting witnesses to your productivity.

Online, alone together

Online, people are creating and finding that kind of accountability. Websites and apps now help you find a task buddy. But there’s an even more popular avenue for finding a virtual body double, either pretaped or live: YouTube videos.

On YouTube, many creators are filming themselves studying, working or cleaning in real time; think of their videos as a friend who’s always up for the grind. McCabe says that these videos can provide a gentle form of accountability for the creators.

“If you don’t do the thing, people will know,” she says. “And if you do do the thing, people will know. So you get a little bit of dopamine hit even from that, even from just going, ‘I’m doing a good job and somebody knows that I’m doing a good job.’”

McCabe says this works not just for the person who made the video but also for the people who use the video.

“The person who’s doing the video is not going to know if you’re actually cleaning or not. But there’s still this gentle social pressure of, ‘Oh, I see somebody cleaning. I feel like I should also be cleaning.’”

She says these virtual sessions probably aren’t quite as effective as getting together for real, but they are useful in certain situations: if you have an odd schedule, for example, or if you’re suddenly seized with the energy to tackle something you’ve been ducking, or if you deal with social anxiety. “You might not feel comfortable asking somebody in real life to body-double with you,” she says. “And then it can be really powerful.”

These body-doubling videos — at least hundreds of them are on YouTube — are cumulatively racking up tens of millions of views.

Hallowell says that even though screen usage can of course be isolating, paradoxically, this kind of creative use of videos might just knit us closer together.

“We live in an age of loneliness,” Hallowell observes. “It’s so paradoxical because we’re connected electronically like never before, but we’ve been disconnecting interpersonally. If you create yourself an audience, even though it’s invisible and online, that makes you feel less lonely. That’s very energizing.”

“It’s not just accountability — it’s imagining an audience,” he adds. “When I write books, I have an audience in mind. And that makes me do much better than if I was just writing for the darkness of the universe.”

Both McCabe and Hallowell say that the technique of body doubling — whether in person or virtual — can help all kinds of people, not just those who have been diagnosed with ADHD and executive-functioning issues.

In an era when we all tend to be at least a little bit distracted a lot of the time, body doubling can help keep us all on track. And maybe try turning off all those phone alerts too.