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Body Doubling

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Re: Body Doubling

#101

Post by salty_biscuits »

munificent wrote: post #61

There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was. After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc. I can't but think that so many of the ma…

I don't know, plenty of alienation in 19th century literature where everyone was living in everyone else's pocket. A lot has changed in that time, including our openness to expression of our internal suffering. I grew up in a similar way, my overwhelming memory was that it felt utterly stifling! I couldn't wait to move away and be anonymous.

Re: Body Doubling

#102

Post by comprev »

jvm___ wrote: post #100
munificent wrote: post #61

There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was. After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc. I can't but think that so many of the ma…

profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is This is the main problem in my marriage, we don't consume the same media - we've tried to find something in common to watch, but mostly spend it on our phones watching our own media streams, edu-tainment YouTubers for me and Netflix/Disney/Facebook watch for her. You can't make cultural references or have inside jokes if you don't consume the same media.

Put the phones away and find activities which you both enjoy?

Re: Body Doubling

#103

Post by unity1001 »

munificent wrote: post #61

There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was. After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc. I can't but think that so many of the ma…

> many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is

Media consumption is just a replacement for social interaction. And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work. Our society is geared towards extracting maximum profits from people. It does not permit them to have any excess energy left at the end of the workday.

Re: Body Doubling

#104

Post by squokko »

celtain wrote: post #78
squokko wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even just the neighbors and friends - people used to live in large family units with 10+ people per household. This meant a much broader support network if, for example, you got ill and couldn't take care of your kid for awhile.

3 more family members are about to move into my house. No matter how much I tell myself that having a larger household and more social time will be "good for me", and of course having help with childcare will be hugely convenient, I'm really starting to dread the loss of privacy.

I'd feel the same way, and that's because I was raised in the Western environment of single-family nuclear households.

Re: Body Doubling

#106

Post by curiousgal »

tsumnia wrote: post #28
curiousgal wrote: post #6

Why not just have the tv palying in the background? Works for me.

Whenever I visit for my parents for holidays, they have the TV playing something. However, I've always found the ads incredibly distracting, like they're intentionally designed to get my attention.

Netflix with a show you've seen multiple times?

Re: Body Doubling

#107

Post by ilaksh »

atemerev wrote: post #66
ilaksh wrote: post #58

The name seems like ridiculous marketing to me. Kind of like clickbait. I think more accurate would just be something like "silent work partners". It's also bizarre that people seem to think that having trouble concentrating for a significant period of time on something tedious means you have ADHD. It's not at all abnormal to struggle with this at times. It's really more extreme cases that should be considered ADHD.

ADHD is not just "having trouble concentrating". It is a completely broken prioritizer, executive function deficit, and nearly non-existing ability to linearize tasks into intermediate-scale command sequences. And tons of other things, some of them good (like immediate recall of association trees, whether we like it or not; this helps if you want some original ideas), but most of them bad. About 3% of population have…

That's my point. The article is written as if trouble concentrating = ADHD.

Re: Body Doubling

#108

Post by Mordisquitos »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #86
Mordisquitos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think people with ADHD already know about it? I can't see any reason why they could be expected to, let alone for all their lives.

My family is nearly 100% ADHD. We all know it. And we're not special.

The reason that you "all know it" is not that knowing it is a characteristic feature of ADHD. Rather, it is because you are all related and in contact with each other. 100% of your family having ADHD does not make your family representative of the general ADHD population.

Re: Body Doubling

#109

Post by kelnos »

celtain wrote: post #78
squokko wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even just the neighbors and friends - people used to live in large family units with 10+ people per household. This meant a much broader support network if, for example, you got ill and couldn't take care of your kid for awhile.

3 more family members are about to move into my house. No matter how much I tell myself that having a larger household and more social time will be "good for me", and of course having help with childcare will be hugely convenient, I'm really starting to dread the loss of privacy.

That's just a function of how you (and I) grew up. In many cultures, the norm is that offspring live with their parents until marriage, and in some, even the married couple lives with one set of parents.

This is just a reminder that a lot of the things we find comfortable aren't inherent; they're just a reflection of what the norms where during our formative childhood and early adult years.

Re: Body Doubling

#110

Post by eyelidlessness »

marshmallowmad wrote: post #57

I think this is the reason why in-person work environments will be more productive over the longer term for any larger organization. Not saying I’m against remote work, as I actually prefer it myself.

Surely it’ll depend on many factors: employees’ own preferences, level and sincerity of support-in-principle from leadership, actual working environments, relative distribution of remote vs in-person, level and burden of effort to accommodate mixed teams.

I also prefer remote (and have been remote probably 75% of my career). I’m also ADHD, and while I’d never even heard of ”body doubling” by name it’s something I’ve found helpful sometimes, under some circumstances.

For the minority of my career spent in office, it’s ranged from wildly productive (great team fit, good balance in favor of focus time) to hilariously counterproductive (excessive meetings and process ceremony, continuous interruptions whether ostensibly work-related or social, unbearably noisy).

For the times I’ve worked on mixed remote/office, I’ve generally felt my own and my teams’ productivity is great except when leadership found the arrangement objectionable (self-fulfilling prophecy I guess), or when team communications became challenging at scale (eg we found it hard to do “standups” with ~15 people in office and ~10 people on a screen; but realistically we shouldn’t have had that many people in any meetings).

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