A novel approach to productivity
ABL #1: Can we really get more done just by reading about it?
Seventy-five percent of the way through any creative project, I’m suddenly seized with the urge to throw in the towel on the whole thing. This feeling is how I know with certainty two things:
It’s too late to give up now because I’m already almost finished.
It’s time to hit pause and go read a novel.
As a productivity strategy, reading a novel is neither a new idea nor my own. When we come up against a creative block, trying to push through anyway doesn't just waste energy; it also racks up extra guilt and frustration that weigh us down even more. So when my Output Brain stalls, I switch to my Input Brain. And because I write nonfiction almost exclusively, the fictional world of a novel is usually enough of a change in pace that I can come back to my work refreshed afterward.
Or, as Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic, “If you can’t do what you long to do, go do something else. You might think it’s procrastination, but — with the right intention — it isn’t; it’s motion. And any motion whatsoever beats inertia, because inspiration will always be drawn to motion.”
This is the situation in which I found myself last month when, on a trip to my local library, I picked up a copy of Emily Henry’s Beach Read.
I was planning the launch of this very newsletter and had come up against a block. My brain felt like an overcooked meatball tangled in a spaghetti snarl of imposter syndrome and perfectionism — which are really just designer names for plain ol’ fear of rejection and failure.
I needed a story that would suck me in so deeply the chatter couldn't reach, and a quick win (finishing a whole book) to shut them up once I resurfaced. People We Meet On Vacation, another Henry title, only took me a day and a half when I read it on vacation with my best friend in 2021. And this copy of Beach Read felt good in my hands, its laminated paperback flopping gently open against its perfectly loose spine.
We were also in the middle of a cold snap, and I’d just scrolled through multiple friends’ tropical vacation photos on Instagram. Honestly, it had me at “beach.”
Don't let the title fool you, as I did. This isn’t a popcorn paperback you cram into your beach bag to halfheartedly flip through while your partner naps.
First of all, it’s not an ocean beach. It’s a lake beach, which changes its entire vibe. It’s a steamy summer romance, but it’s also an exploration of the icy tundra of grief. It’s about the things that tie us together, but it’s also about the walls we build to shield ourselves from each other. It felt too naughty to read with my fiancé in the room. Then it left me ugly-sobbing in front of my cats, who had no idea what was going on and were very concerned.
But the biggest plot twist has nothing to do with the actual storyline: Deep down, Beach Read is actually a productivity book!
“When friends ask me what Beach Read is about, I tell them it’s about a disillusioned romance author and a literary fiction writer who make a deal to swap genres for the summer,” Henry writes in the Readers Guide at the end of the book. “When other writers ask me what Beach Read is about, I tell them it’s about writer’s block.”
The story follows January and Gus, college rivals who find themselves spending the summer in neighboring beach houses. Their bet to swap genres shakes each of them from their creative ruts, and soon they’re accountability buddies. By the end, both writers have written and sold a book, and January has overcome her writer’s block.
And at home in my corner reading chair, the negative voices had quieted and I felt more inspired, empowered, and motivated. I’d just watched not one but TWO writers produce whole manuscripts, in challenging new genres, while processing major traumas, in a matter of mere days! — at least from my perspective. I could surely hit “publish” on a silly little newsletter I’d only told two people about.
That extra boost didn’t just help me get this thing off the ground. It also reminded me of another productivity method I recently learned about: body doubling.
More hands make less (distracting) work
Body doubling is a term coined in the 1990s by Linda Anderson, a master-certified ADHD coach, to describe the tactic of having another person present while working on difficult or tedious tasks as a way to stay focused.
I first learned about body doubling from Work Brighter founder Brittany Berger, who writes about productivity methods for neurodivergent people and covered body doubling last year. (You may remember Brittany as one of the influential women I’ve dubbed my “Burnout Fairy Godmothers”).
Essentially, body doubling works like this:
The other person doesn’t collaborate or directly assist in any way, or even necessarily need to work on something similar to you. They’re just there — a grounding visual modeling the calm, focused behavior you want for yourself.
In response, you feel what Berger describes as a helpful kind of peer pressure to follow suit. This person is giving your their time, so now you’re obligated to use it well. And because the other person is staying on task, you don’t get distracted as easily as you do by yourself.
Why it works is a little trickier to pin down. There’s not a lot of research available on body doubling (although based on the pandemic spike in ADHD diagnoses, I suspect more is forthcoming).
Some sources attribute it to a cluster of motor cells in the brain called mirror neurons, which were discovered in macaque monkeys in the 1990s. Watching a researcher eat an ice cream cone, a monkey’s brain responded as though he were eating the ice cream himself, mirroring the experience.
In other words, one could have a physical experience just by watching someone else have that experience. You could be more productive by being around people who are being productive.
Like how seeing someone else yawn always makes me yawn (just writing this sentence about yawning made me yawn!).
Then again, mirror neurons could have absolutely nothing to do with why body doubling works — in fact, the scientific community is still divided on whether mirror neurons even exist in humans! And the deeper you dig, the muddier things get:
A lot of mirror neuron research is old, which makes it less relevant and less likely to still be accurate.
One of the neuroscientists whose name pops up the most in relation to mirror neurons also advocated a wild “broken mirror” hypothesis regarding mirror neurons’ role in autism spectrum disorders, which has since been disproven and, frankly, sounds kinda ableist.
Even a massive 2013 literature review of 800 (!!!!) studies on mirror neurons — which is already a decade out of date — couldn’t reach a definitive conclusion about mirror neurons’ actual function. That’s partly because the specific type of study done in monkeys is considered “too invasive1 to be performed in people, other than in exceptional circumstances (such as during required brain surgery).” A Wired summary of the review warns,
When you see [mirror neurons] mentioned in the media, remember that most of the research on these cells has been conducted in monkeys. … And that we’re still trying to establish for sure whether they exist in humans, and how they compare with the monkey versions. As for understanding the functional significance of these cells … don’t be fooled: that journey has only just begun.
I would also like to remind readers that as a process of learning and discovery, science is really just a highly specific way of constantly proving yourself wrong.
Also, I’m not a neuroscientist.
Whether or not I have mirror neurons for Beach Read to activate, once I thought about it, I realized I’ve used body doubling my whole life, and so have you. Let’s start with the obvious: In-person classroom or office settings are just enforced body doubling.
Accountability partners are body doubles. Errand Friends are body doubles.
I was unknowingly body doubling every time I joined a study group or book club or started folding my laundry only because my fiancé was folding his. I’m intentionally body-doubling now — as I write this, I’m posted up at my favorite coffee shop at a long table of other people typing on their own laptops.
A body double doesn't need to be physically present for this to work. According to Berger, phone calls during chores and “_______ with me” videos also count as body doubling.
There are even companies offering virtual co-working (body doubling!) services now, thanks in large part to how the pandemic shifted work styles. I like focused, which combines body doubling with guided meditation, intention-setting, and education.
But what’s so wild to me about Beach Read is the idea that your body double doesn’t have to be a real human or even have a body.
I wasn’t actually sitting down for daily writing sessions with Gus and January, or tagging along on their weekend genre lessons, or working through their traumas with them, because they are made-up characters in a made-up setting! All I was doing was staring at words on a page and hallucinating vividly.
Is that all it takes? Is reading a fictional narrative — written in first-person! that feels important — really enough to convince my brain that I can do hard things2? Is it an actual in-a-pinch productivity hack, or is it just the genius of Emily Henry’s hyper-realistic and ultra-relatable character writing?
Or maybe Gus and January aren’t the only ones acting as body doubles here. Maybe Henry herself is another one.
“I interrogated my writer’s block,” Henry writes in the Reader’s Guide. “I asked how it connected to all the other parts of my life. And the ways in which it seemed dissonant from the rest of my life. And the more curious I became, the more inspiration found its way to me.”
She couldn’t ignore the problem anymore and still do her work. So she made her work about the problem, and found a solution as the result.
To some degree, this mirrors the beginning of my own burnout recovery.
I only started to heal from the chronic stress of hustle culture once I started interrogating where my burnout cycle stemmed from. At first, I even thought it might just be writer’s block, because I could no longer churn out 2K-word blog posts at the speed my clients wanted them. But once I started digging I realized it was something much bigger And then all I had were questions:
Who told me this is what my career has to look like?
Who told me how many hours I have to work in a week, or how much I’m allowed to charge for those hours?
Whose expectations am I so afraid of failing to meet, and what consequences am I really going to face if I do?
Is this even the life I want, or am I just going along with what someone has told me I “should” want??
Who is really the one “shoulding” all over me???
I couldn't move forward — couldn’t complete and break free from that cycle of chronic stress — until I asked myself those hard questions, and until I journaled and mind-mapped and started connecting dots.
“Sometimes we lose the ability to create simply because we’re tired. We need to rest and recover,” Henry writes. “But other times, we can’t move forward because there are hard questions we have to ask first. Hurdles in our path we have to jump or walls that need breaking down — interrogations demanding to be made. And when we’re brave enough to do so, we can make something beautiful. Something we didn’t know we were capable of before we began.”
So when I came up against that block last month, I began interrogating myself again, between Beach Read reading sessions. Who was I really creating Anti-Burnout Life for, anyway? Who did I feel I owed something, and what exactly did I feel I owed them?
And if Emily Henry could do this and come up with Beach Read, what amazing things could I come up with if I just keep interrogating my burnout and making more room for inspiration?
The answers I came up with were: Me; just me; commitment to this practice; and I can’t wait to find out! So I scaled back the scope of this project, at least to start, and pushed back the launch date.
And here I am now with an essay I would never have come up with otherwise. Beach Read was supposed to function as rest or play for me, but it ended up being the missing piece that I needed to move forward with my work.
See? Rest is productive.
Want to try body doubling via fiction but have already read Beach Read? Consider one of these novels about office jobs (I have only read one of them, and yes, it is The Devil Wears Prada).
Other Productivity Methods from Beach Read
1. To pull yourself out of a rut, try a new approach.
This is the whole plot and we’ve talked about it enough, but here’s a quote from the book to back it up:
“I’d half expected to wake up in a panic about our agreement. Instead I was excited. For the first time in years, I was going to write a book that absolutely no one was waiting for.”
2. If you're lacking inspiration, go learn something new.
The genre lessons January and Gus traded with each other are a steady source of new ideas and perspectives to bolster their own imaginations.
“While the interview … hadn’t given me any of those all-consuming tornadoes of inspiration, I had awoken with a glimmer of it. There were stories that deserved to be told, ones I never considered, and I felt a spark of excitement at the thought that maybe I could tell one of them, and like doing it. I wanted to give Gus that feeling too. I wanted him to wake up tomorrow itching to write.”
“For the first time in months, I wasn’t flinching every time my phone or laptop pinged. I was making progress. Of course, a lot of that progress was research, but for every new factoid I gleaned … it seemed like a new plot lightbulb illuminated over my head.”
3. Body double, but don’t forget to turn off your notifications!
Even after they traded phone numbers with each other, January and Gus stuck to less-intrusive handwritten notes held silently aloft from yards away.
“Gus and I made a habit of writing at our respective kitchen tables around noon, and most days we took turns holding up notes.”
4. Set a goal and share it with an accountability partner.
Even if you’re not body doubling, sharing your goal with an accountability partner relies on the same mild peer pressure to keep you on track.
“’Write 2,000 words and then we can talk.’”
5. Change up your location to keep focus.
January moves upstairs to write as she gets closer to her deadline, limiting her exposure to outside distractions.
“I banned Gus from the house for all but an hour each night (we set a literal timer) and spent the rest of my time writing in the second bedroom upstairs, where all I could see was the street below me.”
Subscribe for more reading notes!
If you liked this peek into my research brain and want to see more of my reading notes, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription! Next month I’ll share some of my highlights from my advance reader copy of Simone Stolzhoff’s The Good Enough Job, due out in May but available now for preorder.
Thanks for reading! Talk soon,
💜 Chloe
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NO LOL