Back-to-school Body Double

Two sessions to help you get unstuck

I decided to just turn this into a mini-article, on my regular publishing schedule, instead of a one-off. As a reminder - paid subscribers can register for the events for FREE.

​I don't know about you, but I'm wayyyy behind on my life-admin. Piles of unread emails, partially completed forms, and many many blurry photos in my photos app. I need to focus, but I keep getting pulled away by other things. So, I need your help! My sister-in-law turned me onto body-doubling - and I quickly realized how much these type of sessions can help with getting tasks done.

Let’s Body Double! I’ve got two hours sessions lined up with links below. These sessions are for any and all individuals who need to get some digital life-admin handled. Think

• Filling out back-to-school forms

• Scheduling doctors appointments

• Building a photo book for the last year (just me?)

• Anything else nagging you that you just keep avoiding

ENOUGH ALREAY. I’m totally in… jump to the session link and second session link.

I was in a learning session with a fellow professional organizer, the incomparable Judith Kolberg, founder of the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD), and she talked about doing body-doubling with her clients virtually, some of whom she’d never met personally, to have them do organizing sessions together, quietly, over Zoom. And I’ve been thinking about this since… so here we are.

What is body doubling?

Riddle me this… why can't you make yourself start a task alone, but plunk another person in the room (even one who's just scrolling on their phone) and suddenly you're moving. That person doesn’t even have to be LIVE… I’ve sometimes watched YouTube videos of people organizing and just stood up to organize, like I couldn’t even stop myself. This paradox has a name: body doubling, and it's been passed around the ADHD community for years, word of mouth, long before anyone in a lab coat got around to studying it.

You work near someone, in person or on a video call, and their presence becomes the thing that keeps pulling your attention back to the task. Cleveland Clinic behavioral health specialist Michael Manos describes it as external executive functioning: like having an assistant follow you around, not to help you do the work, just to remind your brain what it agreed to do (Cleveland Clinic).

“Modeled behavior is very potent”

he says, especially for a brain that grabs onto whatever shows up first.

Nobody’s proven why it works. The strategy grew out of lived experience, not research. Controlled studies are still thin, mechanisms still murky (Medical News Today). It’s one of the few productivity tools that got popular in reverse order; results first, evidence later.

I want to stress here, this is especially beneficial for folks with ADHD, but it’s actually useful for anyone - regardless of how ‘spicy’ your neurons are.

How will this go down?

You jump on the call, video on OR off, totally your choice. I will be on the call with video on (not screen sharing, I don’t want to be distracting) but my camera will be an an angle, so it doesn’t feel like I’m staring at you… this isn’t a confrontation.

I’ll do a 1 minute welcome, followed by a 25 minute countdown of focused work. At that time, we’ll do a 5 minute break - stretch, bio break, glass of water - then we’ll do another 25 minute stretch of focused work. (For those of you up on your Pomodoro techniques, this is two pom sessions.)

Save the date

Sessions are $10 each, or FREE with your paid subscription to Sorted State.

Click Here → https://luma.com/44brpqsm

Click here → https://luma.com/9cfa6q6p

I cannot wait to join you and knock out some tasks. Sessions will happen rain or shine!

If you are interested in body-doubling as an ongoing service, especially 1:1, please reach out to me at kate@sorted-state.com