The Power of External Accountability

Adults with ADHD can do sucky things!

Do you notice how it’s very easy to know what to do, and yet…even though you know exactly what you want to do…even though you know…you can’t get started?

How can that be?! How can we know what to do and not do it?!

Insert a whole bunch of science about dopamine, executive dysfunction, etc. etc. We have ADHD. You’ve most likely read all the science. You most likely could give a lecture on how the brain works and why it’s failing to do the things you want to do.

And even though all that…you still can’t get started? I struggle with that, too, sometimes.

Is that just one of the biggest bitches about ADHD?

In all the years that I’ve been helping adults with ADHD - in private coaching, and inside our community coaching - the biggest factor I’ve seen in whether or not things are getting done is external accountability.

Yes, we all want to be able to be accountable to ourselves. That would be wonderful. I would love that! I would also like to make a lot of money. I think that would be awesome. We also want to be in good health. We want a lot of things that we can’t just magically flip a switch and all of a sudden we are that thing.

So while we are struggling to hold ourselves accountable, we must externalize it. This is the answer for many things with ADHD. Externalize! We do that with our time management through timers, we do that with our organizing and planning with a bullet journal or some other external device. And we can successfully get shit done by externalizing our accountability.

One way we can do this is through body doubling. Here’s the link to the podcast episode where I talk about it:

ADHD Big Brother Podcast: Episode 164 - What Is The Deal With Body Doubling

Here’s the definition of body doubling:

Body doubling is a productivity strategy for people with ADHD where having someone nearby—whether they're working on the same task or just present—helps maintain focus and motivation. The other person’s presence provides a sense of accountability and structure, making it easier to start and complete tasks.

There are body doubling platforms all over the place online, and we body double all the time with our friends, family, study partners, and we do it quite often in ADHD Big Brother Community Coaching.

Prior to writing this article we invited Megs Crawford to the community. She’s an incredible ADHD organizing professional from Mindful Moves: Organizing with Megs.

There were 6 of us all on a virtual group video call and we worked on decluttering something while we were all hanging out and talking.

I can honestly say that any kind of decluttering my top dresser drawer was not on any kind of horizon for me. But because we were having the session, I needed something to work on. Over the course of the one hour, I completely organized the entire drawer and got rid of plenty of junk!

If I was doing this without the body double, I would have lost hours to playing with the random shit in the drawer, would have gone on a few side quests with items, and I most likely would have wasted way more time that I wanted. In body doubling, it’s easier to stay focused. And in this case, because we all were chatting, it was actually fun!

Wanna see my results?! This was the drawer when we started…

And this was the drawer at the end of the session:

Pretty amazing!

I highly recommend body doubling. And if you want an entire tribe of likeminded ADHDers to body double with, join ADHD Big Brother! Here’s the November calendar so far. We have another body double coming up later in the month!

What are of your house or apartment is in the most need of decluttering? What’s your plan of attack for decluttering?