3,276 comments on staying on track

On 10 July, three researchers published the most honest ranking of focus tactics I have read this year. No vendor survey. No lab task. Yaukey, Komlodi, and Kuber pulled 114 posts and 3,276 comments from r/adhd, all about working from home, and coded every technology and tactic people said kept them productive. The paper is open access, and the list at the back is what adults with ADHD tell each other when no vendor is listening.

The headline: virtual body doubling was the single most-mentioned focus strategy. Sixty-four mentions. Ahead of noise-cancelling headphones (60), alarms and timers (45), background noise (44), time blocking and calendaring (31), and the Pomodoro Technique (24).

The study is “From Time Blocking to Body Doubling: Analyzing Technologies Employed by Adults with ADHD for Working from Home”, published 10 July 2026 at CHIWORK, the ACM symposium on HCI and work. Before the numbers, the honest caveats, which the authors state themselves: it is a five-page extended abstract, the data is self-reported, and Reddit samples the people who post on Reddit. Some posters may be self-diagnosed. Read everything below as what adults with ADHD say works for them, not as clinical evidence. That is still worth a lot. Lived workarounds are where good tools start.

The ranking

The authors grouped everything into three themes. Here are the most-mentioned strategies, from the paper’s appendix:

Strategy	Mentions	Theme
Virtual body doubling	64	Staying on track
Noise-cancelling headphones	60	Blocking distractions
Alarms and timers	45	Managing time
Background noise, music, Lo-Fi	44	Staying on track
Dealing with phone distractions	44	Blocking distractions
Time blocking and calendaring	31	Managing time
Recording and sending reminders to yourself	30	Staying on track
Pomodoro Technique	24	Managing time
Deleting social media apps	20	Blocking distractions
To-do lists	14	Staying on track

Three things jump out of that table.

1. The winner is a person, not an app

Of the 64 body-doubling mentions, 59 were app-mediated sessions, mostly services like Focusmate that book you a stranger to co-work with on camera for an hour. The other five were passive: a study-with-me stream on YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok running in the corner while you work. None of this is new, either. The Attention Deficit Disorder Association has described the body double since the 1990s: another person beside you, doing their own thing, while you do yours.

The mechanism matters. Time blindness is a perception problem; body doubling targets a different failure point, task initiation. The presence of another person supplies the activation energy an ADHD brain struggles to self-generate. You sit down because someone is watching you sit down. Nothing about the other person needs to be interactive. They just need to be there, doing their own thing.

And the “person” part is starting to blur. A 2025 VR experiment had participants work alone, beside a human body double, and beside an AI one. With either double, people finished the task faster and reported stronger sustained attention than working alone, and the AI double held up about as well as the human. Small study, twelve participants, but it points somewhere interesting: presence is the active ingredient, and presence can be built.

2. The middle of the table is a planner’s job

The “managing time” theme reads like a spec sheet. Alarms and timers, labelled and audible. Time blocking. Pomodoro. Colour-coded calendar entries to show the type of task at a glance. Smart lights that change colour to signal a task switch. One user’s daily ritual of reviewing email, picking top tasks, and moving them onto today, snoozing the reminder until it is done.

Notice what all of these are: attempts to make time visible and physical. Colour for category. Light for transitions. A timer you can hear. This is the argument for a round planner in other people’s words: a list stores your day, but a shape shows it. On a 24-hour dial, colour is what part of life a block belongs to, the now indicator moves so you can feel the afternoon draining, and the gap before your next meeting is a wedge you can see rather than a subtraction you have to perform. It is the same test that separates the best apps for time blindness: duration drawn to scale, your position in the day visible without arithmetic.

The paper also notes, dryly, that several users blocked time and then worked straight through their own boundaries. Anyone with ADHD recognises this. A plan is not a fence. Which is exactly why the two halves of this study belong together: time blocking decides when, and body doubling is what holds you in the block. More on that in a moment.

3. The strength-based exceptions

The authors’ sharpest observation is not in the table. Almost every strategy in the dataset, they argue, is deficit-based: tools to correct, mask, and pass as neurotypical at work. Many posters described masking through video calls, hiding accommodations from HR, and quietly paying out of pocket for the apps and monitors that keep them employed.

The exceptions were the users who went the other way. They aimed hyperfocus at learning automation, scripts, macros, Power Automate, and rebuilt their workflows around how their brains actually run. The authors call these “beacons of possibility”: tools that build on ADHD strengths instead of sanding people down to fit the tool.

That framing is a quiet indictment of most productivity software, mine included, and it is the standard worth building against. A planner should not be a compliance document you fail by 2pm. It should bend when the day bends.

What we are doing about it

Full disclosure: I make Reassign, a 24-hour circular day planner, so I read this paper with obvious self-interest. Here is the honest mapping.

The middle of the table is what the dial already does. Time blocking drawn to scale on a round face, colour by area of life, a live now indicator, day reflection for seeing the day you lived against the day you planned. When the plan breaks, Claude or ChatGPT can reshape it over MCP in one sentence instead of ten drags.

The top of the table is a gap almost no planner touches, and the dial has started closing it. The Pomodoro half is live: focus intervals split a working block into a rhythm of focus and rest, drawn as beads right on the ring. Body doubling is what is still coming: share your day so a friend can work alongside you and see the wedge you are in, and further out, the version the VR study hints at, Claude as the body double, sitting with you through the block and checking in when it ends. That part is on our roadmap, labelled soon, not shipped. You will see each piece on the changelog when it is real.

What you can do today

None of this needs to wait for a feature. Body doubling and time blocking stack right now, with any planner, and a third habit locks them in:

1. Block the work. One block, one task, drawn where the day actually has room.
2. Book the body. A Focusmate session timed to the block, a co-working friend on a call, or a study-with-me stream if live humans are one demand too many today.
3. Close the loop. At the end, mark what happened. Kept, skipped, changed. That reflection is what turns one good afternoon into a pattern.

The paper’s deepest finding is not any single hack. It is that 3,276 comments of hard-won workarounds exist because most tools still ask ADHD brains to pretend to be something else. The fix is not another list with better notifications. It is tools shaped like the people using them.

The day is round. The tomato timer always was. And it turns out the best focus tool of all is somebody else, quietly working beside you.