Body doubling for work-from-home days

Home has no social cues for work. Add some.

The short version: try one today

• Start the day on a quiet call with a colleague.
• Work from a café twice a week.
• Post your three goals in a team channel.

Nobody around to work with? Priori has body doubling sessions built in. (We make it. It's free to download.)

Offices are annoying, but they do one thing well. Everyone around you is visibly working, so you work too. At home there is a bed three metres away and nobody to notice when your quick break lasts until lunch. Body doubling for work puts some of those missing social cues back into a work-from-home day.

Why home is harder than it should be

In an office, a dozen small signals tell your brain what mode it is in. People arrive. Laptops open. Someone asks if you saw the email. None of that happens in your flat. You have to generate the start, the pace and the finish yourself, and self-starting is one of the things ADHD makes hardest.

It can sting more in a first job. You want to look capable, so you stay quiet about struggling and make up the hours at night. Many women with ADHD describe exactly this kind of masking at work. Adding company during the day is a far kinder fix than a secret 10pm shift.

Three ways to add company

• Start the day on a quiet call with a colleague. Fifteen to thirty minutes, cameras optional, both doing your own first task.
• Work from a café twice a week. Fixed days, so it becomes a routine and not a daily debate.
• Post your three goals in a team channel each morning. Keep it short and let other people join in.

The morning call does the most. Starting is the expensive part, and a 9:15 call means someone expects you to be at your desk. Picture a Monday with 47 unread emails. Alone, you might circle them until eleven. On a call with a colleague clearing her own inbox, you open the first one because that is plainly what the two of you are there to do.

Café days work differently. Strangers typing give you the hum of an office without the interruptions, and getting dressed and leaving the flat is a transition your brain can feel. The same logic sits behind ADHD coworking, if you want to go further with it.

Posting goals is the lightest touch. Three lines, written before you open your inbox. Now somebody knows what you meant to do today, and that small bit of visibility helps you stay on it.

Asking a colleague without making it weird

You do not have to mention ADHD, and whether you ever disclose at work is entirely your call. Try: 'I focus better with company. Want to do a quiet working call at 9:15 a couple of mornings a week?' Plenty of remote workers feel isolated and will jump at it.

Pick someone at your level if you can, so it feels like two people working and not like being supervised. If nobody at work fits, a friend in a completely different job does the trick. She does not need to understand your spreadsheet.

When body doubling for work stops helping

Sometimes the call turns into a daily gossip session. Fun, but you now have a meeting instead of a focus block. Reset it with a format: two minutes of hello, say your first task, mute.

Sometimes the café is the problem. Too loud, bad wifi, and you spend the morning choosing a pastry. Keep one reliable spot and stop auditioning new ones. If messages and notifications are what keep breaking your focus, the piece on work distractions covers that side.

And some weeks nothing works as well as it did, for no reason you can name. That is normal. Keep the smallest version going, even if it is only the three goals in the channel, and build back up from there.

Quick questions

How do I body double when I work from home?

Add another person to part of your day. A quiet morning call with a colleague, a couple of café days a week or posting your daily goals in a team channel all give you the sense that someone else is working alongside you.

Do I have to tell my colleague I have ADHD to ask for a working call?

No. You can simply say you focus better with company and suggest a short quiet call. Whether to disclose a diagnosis at work is a personal decision, and you can ask for this kind of arrangement without it.