Brief housekeeping: We’ve moved the newsletter from Substack to Beehiiv (here’s a good explanation of why), but new platforms come with new changes. Beehiiv clips long emails (y’all know I love to ramble), so we’re going to break our links/rec sections into a smaller, weekly issue called Backlog. That means you’ll get one more email from us, but they’ll be more consistent than I’ve been lately, which helps because I’m doing more reporting for longer issues and that takes time. But! Since we’re trying something new,  I’d love to hear what else y’all would like to see in those smaller posts. Quick app recommendations? Tutorials? Explainers? Interviews? Something totally different? I want to be mindful of what I send to your inbox, so if you could me know in this survey, it’d help a lot!

Medea just launched her own newsletter, Always Nostalgic! It’s basically her journal about ‘90s nostalgia, and the first issue comes out tomorrow. Check it out here.

Aside from a first date telling me that they’d “never dated a bald guy before,”  it’s been a long time since I’ve been insecure about my hair loss. Even so, I’ll never forgive St. Joseph’s Catholic School for taking some of my best hair years from me.

Thanks to a judge’s poorly-thought-out custody arrangement, my mom couldn’t remove me from that terrible school without her ex-husband’s approval. This left me with one choice: become such a menace that the school would have no choice but to kick me out. Unfortunately for me,  the powers that be valued income more than they loathed disruption.

To speed-run my delinquency, I joined a rebellious cohort of navy-khaki-clad boys who gleefully ignored the school’s overreaching dress code, starting with the guideline that our hair not extend below our earlobes or eyebrows. As our locks dropped closer and closer to the floor, the warnings and citations poured in. Eventually, the school principal, Ms. Kwader, had to come speak to what one teacher called “The Motley Crew.”

As Ms. Kwader escorted the Crew into her office, she told each of us that we couldn’t return to class until our parents took us to get our hair cut. My mom’s illness had been flaring up that morning, so I knew she couldn’t pick me up, and I had just cut ties with my court-mandated father figure. Of course, the school couldn’t be bothered to give me a day of grace. 

With the urgency of a fire drill, Ms. Kwader placed a large metal bowl over my head and took her orange Fiskars scissors through my disobedient hair. In about five minutes, one member of the Motley Crew had officially joined the Three Stooges.

Expulsion continued to evade me, but a bad haircut didn’t stop me from trying– and certainly didn’t save my mom from stressing about her kid’s well-being. Joining the Crew and growing our hair in defiance helped me learn to take a stand and get a glimpse of true solidarity. It’s true that we lost the battle, but we never lost our bond.

Phone a friend

Not every challenge needs the camaraderie of rowdy preteens to endure, but support is almost always welcome. Alice Gendron, YouTuber and author of The Mini ADHD Coach: Tools and Support to Make Life Easier, wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until she was 29. “My first plan of action when I was diagnosed was to survive this tsunami of emotion,” she told me in an interview. Body doubling has been instrumental in weathering that storm.

For the uninitiated, body doubling is sort of like having an accountability buddy: keeping someone nearby to help you stay focused on a task that you struggle concentrating on, like studying or doing the dishes. Maybe that friend studies along with you, or maybe they work on their novel while you blitz through your email backlog. They could, theoretically, just scroll their For You Page, but that’s their business.

Gendron found body doubling through Jessica McCabe, who runs the How To ADHD YouTube channel, and used studywithme videos as a form of digital body doubling to help her focus when she was a freelance writer. Those videos aren’t the same as, say, having a study buddy in the library with you, but Gendron says it helps nonetheless. “It’s not live, but it still gives you the feeling of having someone close to you,” she says. There’s also the old-fashioned route of calling a loved one and chatting while you do the dishes or fold your laundry — something to keep your mind occupied while you’re doing a menial task. “It’s still activating this accountability component that is really what works with body doubling,” Gendron says.

Bear witness

Alicia Navarro, founder of the service Flown, discovered the concept of flow through Cal Newport’s book Deep Work. “The erosion of our ability to focus is one of the biggest existential problems that we face,” Navarro says. “Not only does it impact us personally as a driver to a lot of anxiety, depression, etc., it also causes the feeling of a lack of purpose.”

Ricky Yean, co-founder and CEO of Flow Club (another body doubling service, though he suggests the term “context setting”), says the concept is a powerful way to convince your brain to do the thing you want to do, rather than the avoidant thing you fall back on. “I think the most important aspect of body doubling is what it does to your brain,” he told me. “We wanted to solve our social isolation and general loneliness problem through the pandemic.”

Both services take different approaches, but have the same goal of providing an encouraging space that helps you get things done. In a demo she gave me of Flown, Navarro emphasized the service’s focus on decreasing feelings of isolation for remote workers, atomization of habits (breaking them down into smaller chunks), and compensating for a lack of human connection. “You get the benefits of working in an office without the negatives,” she says, noting that much like the way we yawn when we see someone else yawn, watching other people blitz through tasks can inspire you to do the same. She’s seen people finish their PhD theses, work on their novels, and complete simpler tasks like cleaning the kitchen or folding laundry.

“Once you actually go through the friction of having to declare something to somebody or a group of people, it feels almost like an event,” Yean says. “It only happens because you signed up for it and made a pre-commitment when you signed up.” Even if you go into a session without the full commitment, he says eventually it rubs off on you. Navarro echoes that sentiment: “That’s the beauty of body doubling. It’s not just about focus, it’s also about these moments of human connection.”

Shine a light

That’s all well and good, but bringing a group setting into your productivity can lead to a sense of shame if you’re witnessing everyone else clear their plate while you’re still struggling to get started. Yean and Navarro both put a lot of thought into avoiding shame and ensuring their services are empowering rather than discouraging. “We’re the biggest critics of ourselves already,” Yean says.

I tried out a session of Flow Club, which lets you set a list of tasks you want to get done, and provides check-in times throughout the sessions to note your progress and encourage others to keep going. Flown, on the other hand, doesn’t list all your tasks; instead, it lets you set a single intention for the session, which can be anything from a tiny task like going through emails or a larger goal like finishing a screenplay. The service encourages you to keep your camera on during your session, as Navarro says it’s key to fostering that human connection that makes body doubling work. In each session, you can congratulate people (Flow Club uses digital confetti) when they accomplish a task, and have check-ins throughout the session to share progress or struggles.

“I think the nice thing is that these sessions limit the social interaction because when you’re in the office or at work, sometimes the conversation can go on for a very long time,” says Perrine Lasserre, a PhD student who uses Flown to work on her studies. Body doubling sessions, on the other hand, provide a structure that fosters working without allowing too much chatter. “You’re usually either on your laptop or your phone, so it’s quite easy to log on and get yourself in the flow of it and be like, ‘okay, now I’m here to work’,” she says.

Amanda Reynaert, owner of Citrine Design Co., swears by body doubling as a way to manage her ADHD. She started by doing Zoom sessions with her team, but after that fizzled out, she found Flown. “What body doubling did was give me a container,” she says. “I just show up at this time; it wasn’t necessarily about getting a specific project done in that amount of time.” To her, it’s just about building trust in herself to get something done. “Sometimes I get 10 out of 10 things done, but if I get one, that’s a win.”

By the end of my Flow Club session, I’d caught up on my seemingly endless backlog of emails (though I was back at 50 unread by the end of the day), and set up a turntable I needed to test for work. I’d hoped to get more done, but thanks to everyone else in my session and their words of encouragement, I didn’t feel bad about it.

My thanks to Medea Giordano for editing this issue.