Does "Body Doubling" work?

But first, a short and foul rant about people who don't procrastinate

I’ll explain... Image from Flow Club.

I was going to start this week’s post by asking, “do you procrastinate on longer, more complex tasks when nobody is watching?” But I’m not going to ask that question, because I know the answer is yes.

Of course you put things off when you could be watching Netflix, doing the dishes, walking the dog, cleaning your desk, responding to that email, or scoring any one of the countless other easy wins in life. We’re wired to go for the low-hanging fruit when it’s available at the expense of the higher-up stuff that will still be there tomorrow. Almost universally.

Okay, some people, apparently, don’t procrastinate. Maybe it’s just their perfectly curated social media lives that showcase such idyll, and it’s actually all bullshit. But we know these people.

They get up at 5am or 4am or 3am or, fuck it, they don’t need to sleep at all, these perfect assholes, in order to 1) take detailed notes on last night’s vision quest voyage into lucid dreaming, 2) meditate while doing the scorpion handstand yoga pose (which they call “Vrschikasana B” because, remember, they are assholes) while syncing their circadian stats on their brand-new fitness watch, 3) hit the gym for a circuit of cardio and weights that is fully optimized to their blood type, phenotype, metabolic type, chronotype, somatotype and bowel movement calendar, 4) write 86 journal pages while listening to lofi jazz on YouTube Premium, 5) attain enlightenment, 6) feed their six angelic toddlers locally-grown, home-made, hand-pressed, organic, dairy-free, gluten-free, carb-free, non-GMO, Fair-Trade fuck-you granola with cashew nut milk, 7) sorry, what the hell am I talking about, the toddlers feed themselves this miraculous meal from glass bowls that never break without spilling a drop after waking up on their own time, and then they brush their teeth, get dressed, spirit themselves off to some rainbow-swaddled Maria Montessori daycare wherein they will finally start learning algebra and, oh yeah, these kids of course know how to share so well, the little demon-douchebags-in-training, and 8) don’t eat because they intermittent fast, obvi, but on their perfectly calibrated gut microbiome they read a couple online newspapers in full as well as The Economist and The Atlantic and Carl Gustav Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious—all before the sun rises.

Oh, and they have to do ten things, not some crappy number like eight, even though I’m sure they’d tell you that eight is lucky in Chinese culture because of course they know that, but I only know eight of them because that was the point at which I took out a No. 2 pencil and stabbed myself in the eye.

Some perfect bastard doing the scorpion handstand pose just to make you feel shitty and worthless.

For the Rest of Us

The rest of us suck and we need crutches and tricks and shortcuts and “life hacks” in order to achieve a fraction of this perfection. We’re always looking for the next trend to pull us out from the basic-bitch doldrums.

And I found it: it’s called body doubling. There’s actually scant scientific research on this strategy, and if you look it up, almost everything that comes back is about ADHD. Here’s the gist: want to finally get something done, like finish that report or write that paper or clean your room? Don’t do it alone. Get a double. Get someone to do similar work in parallel with you, probably online but maybe in-person too. Magically, in such circumstances, we seem more likely to focus and do what we set out to do.

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It’s similar to setting up in a library or cafe. For some people it’s the ambience and anonymity. For others it’s the accountability, conscious or subconscious, of saying you’ll do something and then having other people watch you put your money where your mouth is. Again, the science is thin, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a tribal switch in the brain that activates when we’re with other people and keeps us on task—the same one, perhaps, that keeps us from stealing. It’s almost dystopian, reminiscent of Big Brother or the emerging “surveillance state”, but it seems to work for a lot of people. You’d trade away your freedom and dignity for a little more productivity, wouldn’t you? Hell yeah!

And it works for me. For a few weeks now I’ve been attending Freewrite Fridays at Yukon University. It’s literally just a bunch of people from all around Whitehorse who get together every Friday at noon in a classroom to work by themselves but next to other people. Ivan Coyote hosts but, aside from a little chit-chat at the start and end of the hour, it’s quiet time. Most reasonable people might ask… why?

It works. Got a book you want to write but nobody is breathing down your neck for it? Been saying for months that you just need to go through those emails to get to Inbox Zero but, really, does it matter? These are things we constantly put off because the short-term incentives are weak or non-existent. We need the tribe.

Freewrite Fridays have given me some of my most productive actual writing time over the past month, as other priorities pull me away the rest of the time. But this week I leveled up, thanks to Dave Hill. He recommended Focusmate, a service that pairs strangers together for online body doubling sessions. You show up for your session, chat at the start and end, and work in between. That’s it. Again… why?

It works. I’ve set myself at my computer countless times over the past few months to work on my novel. I’ve set timers, written out goals, tried little routines…only to find myself, an hour later, thriving on the easy wins: answering emails or doing podcast editing work or, yes, writing for this Substack. But having a body double on the other end—someone who can only really see that I’m sitting there, that’s it—just seems to keep me on track. It’s weird.

Okay, so it’s only been a week. Maybe this will peter out because it’s just another exterior trick. Because it’s me, and I don’t eat—let alone hand-craft—fuck-you granola. We’ll see. But I’ll let you know. Hey, maybe a couple more months of Focusmate and Freewrite Fridays will convince me to start doing yoga and be a better father and wake up at 5am or 4am or…

No. If that happens, remind me to get a No. 2 pencil, and tell me where to stick it.

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Writing

9/10. Four days straight of writing for about an hour a day is not enough time to get a first draft done by the end of the year—but it’s the best I’ve felt about it, and I feel like I’m ramping up. With that concentrated time comes discovery and confidence. In just a few days I have a way better grasp of what I’m writing.

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Reading and Listening

• My friend Calvin introduced me to the What Went Wrong podcast, about the behind-the-scenes insanity of films like Gladiator, Deadpool, Waterworld and Apocalypse Now. Very entertaining and a nice break from my usual heavy ear-load.

• An episode of The Gray Area: “Your mind needs chaos”, featuring philosopher of cognition Mark Miller of the University of Toronto. The mind is, fundamentally, a predictive machine, and everything about it—from mental illness to social media fatigue to optimization—can be understood from this lens, which is now predominant in neuroscience.

• Started Kitchen Confidential (2000) by the late Anthony Bourdain. What a joy to hear such a distinctive, irreverent, high-octane voice right at the start of his writing career.

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Quote of the Week

“The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.”

— Jack Kerouac