This week I’m talking with ADHD coach Shane Thrapp - but specifically, today we’re going to be diving into the service Focus101 - which is a free body-doubling site designed to help you get the most of your work time. Now, funny story, I’m actually working on this while body-doubling through Focus101 right now.
Now in this episode, we’ll be getting into exactly what body-doubling is and how it can be incredibly helpful for completing those tasks that are hard for us to follow through on on our own. We also talk about a number of other tools that can be used in conjunction with body doubling, such as the Pomodoro technique, alarms, using our calendars, and ways to break our tasks into smaller pieces.
William Curb: I'm here with Shane Thrapp and it is great to have you here and you want to give a little introduction of yourself and we can talk a little bit about Focus 101.
Shane Thrapp: Yeah, as you said, my name is Shane Thrapp. I'm an ADHD life coach. I also help run a men's ADHD support group called the Men's ADHD Support Group and I am the operations director for them.
William Curb: All right. So we decided to have this show to talk about Focus 101, which is a accountability platform?
Shane Thrapp: It's kind of a combination of a tool called a Focus Mate. It's a body doubling for all intents and purposes, but it's growing into a tool that's going to kind of combine the best aspects of Zoom and Focus Mate and other tools that are out there, like building accountability groups and things like that, and bring it all into one cohesive, all in one tool. It includes things like Pomodoro Technique that's integrated into the system itself. You don't have to have some external tool. It includes white noises, cafe sounds where you can have like an ambiance sound in the background.
And there's also public rooms where a group of people can get together and essentially like Flow Club have a moderated session where everybody kind of talks about what they're going to be doing and works on it throughout the thing, muted or unmuted. And then they take breaks and things along those lines and then everybody's be able to discuss afterwards what all they got done. And so that accountability really helps people, especially neurodivergent people who have a tendency to hyper focus and get locked into something for a long amount of time to be able to split it up and be able to have those breaks that they need so that their brain doesn't get burnt out.
William Curb: Awesome. Can we first start with like a definition of body doubling? Because I'm sure some people have not because that's a fairly recent term from what I understand.
Shane Thrapp: Yeah, absolutely. Body doubling is the practice of working either virtually or in person with another person in place where you're working on your task and they may be working on their task. And the goal is to help each other with accountability and getting the tasks done and helping with reducing how much distraction can be involved. Typically, if it's virtually, both people are muted, they're working on their own things. They talk about what they're going to work on at first and at the end of it, they check in with each other and they say, oh, hey, congratulations. And we give each other that dopamine rush that we need when we know that we did a good job because somebody, even a stranger telling us that is really helpful.
William Curb: Well, and it's one of those things where when I hear about body doubling and even like just thinking about doing it, I go, why would I work more if another person's there? Like I'm the same distractions and all that kind of stuff. And yet when I actually do body doubling and I get so much more done, it's one of those things where it's like, I heard this works and it works. That's kind of frustrating.
Shane Thrapp: Because we have ADHD.
William Curb: Yeah.
Shane Thrapp: And like a lot of people with ADHD, we need external tools. This means external accountability and having another person there puts that pressure on us to do the work that we said that we were going to do. And that helps us reduce the likelihood that we're going to go get distracted doing something else. How many times have you had a friend that said, hey, I'm going to come over and you look at your house and all of a sudden you realize, oh crap. And you just start doing that like one hour, just like super deep clean of the entire house.
William Curb: Or even like the really superficial top level clean so they don't know what you really live like.
Shane Thrapp: That's still cleaning.
William Curb: Yeah.
Shane Thrapp: You know, you're still doing the work. But because of that pressure of that person coming over, you're holding yourself accountable to getting the thing done, which is that little hump that we need to get over the starting of work that we want to get done. And then we find ourselves just hitting that momentum and then riding it through. And then by the time they get here, most of our areas that need to be seen are clean.
William Curb: So I got to play around with the service a little bit. And it is like you sign up for a time. And I found it much easier to like now suddenly this project, my initial one was just to go through my email. And it was so much easier to go through my email because it was on my calendar then because I'm meeting with this person.
This is what I'm going to do. I know when I started, I didn't feel like doing it, but I still was able to get through doing it because it's on my calendar. If I'm not there, that person's just, I don't want to just like super inconvenience this person. But hey, I'm going to be here and then not show up.
Shane Thrapp: So Christian Rathe, CEO of Focus 101, designed a system based on cognitive behavioral therapy practices. And he built the system to utilize our natural tendencies to people please. Because again, oh no, I don't want to just like leave this person hanging. This is an appointment that I have to go to. And for a lot of us to have that appointment anxiety, like that really drills us down into, okay, I got to be there.
William Curb: Yeah.
Shane Thrapp: And so it's helpful. And here's the thing, the goal is to be perfect. You all hear me say this a lot if you listen to any of my other podcasts. The goal is to be perfect. The goal is to do it more often than we don't. And when we have these accountability tools in place, it helps us to be able to do it. It helps us do it more often than we don't. By having that external tool, like using the calendar and everything, and setting it up and adding it to our calendar, we see it, especially if we're putting all the other tools like actually looking at our calendar and using alarms to get those things done, building our task list. It helps us kind of organize our days a little bit more effectively, instead of just being paralyzed about what am I going to do today? Well, you've already set it up. So now you just do those things at that time.
William Curb: I also think there's also that nice thing of like, at the end, you're going to be like, Hey, this is what I got done, which kind of keeps me in my seat the whole time. I can't just like, peace out early because I got bored.
Shane Thrapp: Yeah, the person is there. They're expecting you to discuss with them what you got done. The thing I love about body doubling is that you can do it for essentially anything that you want to get done. Got to clean. All right, cool. Set it up on your phone, put your phone in the kitchen, clean your kitchen.
William Curb: Yeah.
Shane Thrapp: And when you come back and you have that discussion and the person tells you great job or that's awesome, if y'all are cheering each other on, what we're doing is we're actually locking in that thought process that I got this done and we actually look at a clean kitchen and can feel accomplished.
Because sometimes out of sight, out of mind actually even means ignoring our accomplishments. And at the end of the day, we sit here and look back at our day and we're, I didn't get anything done, ignoring the fact that we did get a lot of stuff done, especially like house husbands, house spouses and things like that, when we are getting through so much different things, but they're all tiny things that we don't see the overall whole. And having that recognition helps us with that.
William Curb: Yeah, I think, I know personally, I have a lot of trouble with acknowledging accomplishments. Like if I clean the kitchen, well, that's what I was supposed to do. It's supposed to be clean. So I wouldn't necessarily give myself that kind of celebration, but if my friend cleaned the kitchen, I'm like, hey, great job. And my wife is doing the dishes. I'm like, hey, thank you for doing the dishes. I appreciate that. But I don't tend to do that for myself. So that is like a really nice external piece.
Shane Thrapp: This is one of those things where cognitive behavioral therapy comes back into play, because Dr. Ned Hallibel talks about recognition, response euphoria. It's the exact opposite of rejection sensitivity and dysphoria. It is the external recognition of the work that we do. And having that really helps us, because just like we feel really shitty when we feel like we're getting rejected by somebody, we got to remember the emotional dysregulation has two sides of the coin.
There is the positive emotions and there's the negative emotions. And if we can lean on the positive emotions and put more experiences in our life that compound on that, which means having external sources of affirmations from people around us, even if they are strangers, then we're able to put pressure on ourselves in good ways. And we're able to seek those good affirmations and not fear the rejection so much.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. Going back to the beginning too, so we were talking about some of the other pieces that are integrated here. So we have things like the white noise and specifically I'm also thinking about the Pomodoro technique, which I'm sure some people also don't know about.
Shane Thrapp: The Pomodoro technique is where we essentially just split our time up in different phases. We have our working time. The initial thing is 25 minutes. And then there's a break time where we take five minutes to just kind of honestly blow off steam, pick up our phones, surf the net, go use the bathroom, go grab a snack, go do something, go for a walk. Anything that you can do to kind of break up your time frame so that you're able to get the rest that you need and then come back fresh-minded and start back up.
That Pomodoro technique you usually do in blocks like I said earlier, 25, 5, 25. But you can also do 35, 7, 35, or you can do 40, 10, 40. And at the end of that time, there's a lot less likelihood of you feeling so burned out because you're giving yourself the rest time. And instead of us hyper-focusing so hard on something that we eventually burn ourselves out, that's detrimental.
And yes, I hear a bunch of y'all out there going right now, but if I hit that flow, any kind of interruptions just going to completely throw me off. This is why body doubling is so important. Because you still have to get back into that task. And it is much healthier for us to get the rest that we need in between those breaks. And if we have that accountability factor, we can get back into the task easier.
William Curb: Yeah. And I think there's hyper-focused, absolutely, a double-edged sword. We are drawing more heavily from our future resources and our current resources. But also, Pomodoro technique is a tool that we don't always have to be using for everything. If I'm doing writing, it might be better for me to take a longer go at doing things because that's better for how my brain works. But if I'm answering emails, I want the shorter blocks. It makes it a lot easier to get through everything.
Shane Thrapp: And that's the key is recognizing that doing our passions, those things that we really enjoy, that's what we want to save our mental energy for. And those things that we don't like doing, we want to break it up so that we are using our mental energy in effective and efficient manners. And that's the trick. That right there is recognizing those different types of energy expenditures that we want to use.
William Curb: Because I often think about this earlier this week where I'm like, I just have this little bit of work I need to do. And if I do it now, I could do something fun in the afternoon. But I'm having a mental block doing it right now. And it wasn't actually worth forcing myself to do at that minute. What was better was to go, OK, I'm going to have lunch first. I'm going to take a bit of a break. Then I will do the work. And I can still do the fun thing in the afternoon. Because otherwise, I'm just going to sit there procrastinating doing nothing. And it's being mindful of how I'm using my time.
Shane Thrapp: The decision paralysis, it can really be a huge time stuck for us. But if we are planning for that, yes, I hear all you people sitting here talking about, I don't like structure. OK, look, we have to have structure. This helps us with that. It stacks multiple motivational factors in place. We have an appointment. We are working with a person. We are adding affirmations to it. We have specific tasks that we need to get done. We have blocked off the time. All of these different factors all play into allowing us to be more productive, just for that hour or two hours or three hours that we use it per day.
William Curb: And I think that's also another great point is that we don't need to do this eight hours stay. Like, I know I personally have gotten very much into the idea that you're supposed to have an eight hour work day. Let's do these techniques for eight hours. That also leads to burnout apparently.
Shane Thrapp: 100 percent. The average office worker does three and a half, four hours of work a day in an eight hour period, especially in our capitalistic society. Look at, oh, I'm supposed to work nine to five. Well, are you? You know, because when we have ADHD, we have to look at our actual time that we spend doing what and what we like doing at certain times. I'm super administrative between nine and 12. All my administrative work I'm really good at doing during that time. I know. I know that my meds are going to start wearing off around that time anyways.
I know that there's a number of different factors that are going to be in play. Not just that I have to go pick up my kids at 2.30. I just used a lot of mental energy. I need to go for a walk. I need to spend time outside. I need to do a few other things. And then from 4 to 6, I'm productive again. But then from 8 to 10, I'm super creative.
So kind of focusing my time frames about when I'm actually productive in the way that I want to be productive around those natural inclinations that I have allows me again to be much more effective. Now, I don't work all those times, y'all. But I know that if I have something creative, like I want to do some creative writing, I know that 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. at night is my creative time. And it's really useful for me to do that.
William Curb: Yeah, because we also have different flows of energy throughout the day. We're not going to always feel as drive to be doing things. And so I've been sick this last week. Pushing through the sickness is not necessarily the best thing for me. And I'm going to be getting a lot less done. But if I can like focus my energy, maybe one or two hours where I feel like I have more energy and can do things, then when I'm feeling much more down, I can actually let myself rest.
Shane Thrapp: It's really overwhelming when we look at this task list and we don't have any kind of structure about when we're going to do it. And then we start falling into that decision paralysis that we talked about earlier. We're causing overwhelm. If we then get to the end of our day and we haven't actually done anything that was on our task list, now we're sitting here starting to be down on ourselves, feeling a lot of shame and things of that nature. That's more overwhelm. And the more that we do have these issues of overwhelm, the more injury we're kind of doing to our brain, it's heightened amygdala responses and it's heightened feelings of shame.
And it's heightened feelings of, you know, activating our past trauma and stuff like that. And this can cause us to then start hitting burnout faster. Burnout is when stress and frustration and overwhelming feelings is kind of stacking on top of us. So for those of you all who really aren't really understanding the severity of it, I compare overwhelmed to kind of like pulling your hamstring or doing like somebody serious to your knee. And if you keep trying to run on that knee, or if you keep trying to run on that leg, this got a slight fracture to it, it's going to get significantly worse.
And burnout is whenever your ACL tears and your leg is literally just flopping around and it's severely injured or like a broken knee or something serious. That's what's happening in your mind. You want to manage your life so that you're not doing that to yourself constantly. If you are dealing with burnout. Rest. Go see a therapist. Go see your doctor. Make sure you have the medications that you need. Make sure you're managing your stress and frustration. We want to prevent the injury from this point going forward. And it's constantly going through that cycle of things like that.
William Curb: Yeah. And I also think it's important to mention that burnout is a chronic condition and taking like a one week vacation will not fix it. It is because you consistently have too much on your plate. It's really easy to be like, oh yeah, if I just rest and I'll be better. It's like, no, it's the conditions you're in right now are caused are going to if you don't change those, you're going to get me right back where you are and probably quicker than last time.
Shane Thrapp: Right. Again, if we look at an injury, if you have a busted ACL and you go back out and you're playing frisbee again, guess what's going to happen if you keep trying to twist on that ACL? This is why using tools like Focus 101 is so important is so that we are putting that structure in place in our lives so that we are able to manage our time, our frustration, our stress, our emotions more effectively and get the things that we need to get done, done in a much more effective way.
William Curb: Yeah. It's not all about just willpower and pushing things through because willpower sucks. I know that as much as I want to be like, I can just do things when I want to. It doesn't work like that for me.
Shane Thrapp: No, I've been on medication for a few years now. I go to therapy every day. I'm an ADHD coach. I should be 100% fully healed and cured. No, my life is just as fucked up as other people's lives. I am able to be more effective in my life just because I do it more often than I don't. And that's the key is recognizing that incremental change is the only way that we move forward. And putting in place those external tools allows us to make incremental change happen and be more consistent and we're able to be more persistent in the work that we need to get done.
William Curb: Yeah, I remember this made me think of before I started doing stuff about ADHD management, I would go to coffee shops to work because I didn't want to be there. And I knew that, OK, I'm going to do my work and when I finish, I can go home and do whatever I want. But it's the fact it's like, OK, I'm here now. I might as well be doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Sometimes I won't be, but it's just nice to be to get out and do that. And then that worked for a while and it was less effective over time.
And then when I found out these things about accountability, I'm like, oh, that's what I was doing unconsciously. And the reason it's not working is because I've kind of figured out the system and I'm not reporting to anyone else. I'm not accountable to anyone else. It doesn't matter to anyone that I'm at the coffee shop. But it is going to matter to my body double partner if I'm not there.
Shane Thrapp: And we have to look at those things that actually do motivate people with ADHD. In-cups, right? Interesting novel challenges that have urgency and follow our passions. That urgency is one of those things that we can put in place that can mitigate the need for novel and interesting. If we have a deadline that we know that we need to meet and we've scheduled out our focus one of one times to work on that thing up to that deadline, then we're able to sit here and really take the decision paralysis off the table and turn it into I'm going to do it or I'm not going to do it. And that decision is significantly easier when we're not looking at all the different ways that it can fail.
William Curb: Yeah.
Shane Thrapp: And so if we simplify the decision making process, we can actually find ourselves able to get through a large number of different tasks that at first look super overwhelming. But then as we get started, we ride that momentum all the way through them.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. It's that planning ahead piece that we often don't want to do with ADHD, but it's so important for us to be doing is if we're not planning ahead, it's never going to get on a calendar. And if it's not on a calendar, we're probably not going to get to it. And that's so vital for those long term projects that are more than just a one off task, because like, OK, say I want to write a book, I can't just rely on my motivation for when I want to write to get that done, because that's not consistent enough for finishing a long term project like that.
Shane Thrapp: Yeah, I told my wife the other day, she was like, hey, we have this thing that we're going to do tomorrow night. I was like, is it on the calendar? She's like, no, I said, then it doesn't exist. And she's like, I'll put it on the calendar and I'll send you the invite. OK, thank you.
William Curb: Yeah.
Shane Thrapp: You know, we actually have to have that conversation with ourselves. And this is what I love about Focus 101. Christian has this thing in place where when you initially sign up, it sends you an email and it reminds you to put it on your calendar, which is key.
William Curb: Mm hmm.
Shane Thrapp: And then there's a reminder about one hour before you've got this coming up. And then there's an email that goes out says, this person's joined a thing. Well, it's very hard to ignore those kinds of things unless you just literally have all of your emails turned off. But then that goes back to what I was saying earlier. We have to kind of respect those tools that we put in place, our alarms, our email notifications, whatever tools that we have, we have to put those things in place so that we are able to be more effective.
That's where a lot of people really struggle is paying attention to those emails that they're getting. It is important for us to have those and then at least make sure that we are looking at them at regular times of the day. And if that means that you need to have Alexa or Siri telling you to look at them like I do, that would be a good idea to have that in place. If not those tools, if you're really paranoid, it's too late to be paranoid.
I will say it's also really good to have a verbal component of telling you what you should do, which is why I lean on Alexa and Siri so that they are actually telling me to do the thing, not just an alarm going off. Hey, Shane, it's time for you to do your tasks, your calendar and check your daily activities that you need to get done. Cool, make a decision. I'm going to do it or not.
William Curb: Yeah, an important distinction is that you can decide that, hey, I'm not going to do this now because there are reasons to not do things sometimes. This week, I had to choose to not do a number of things because I was sick. There are some things I shouldn't record when my voice is coming out like this.
And I'm like, I'm not going to record a podcast like that.
Shane Thrapp: Absolutely.
William Curb: I was like, I have to make sure that I'm like physically able to talk today, which was great because I can. It doesn't have to be like, if I feel bad, that's a good reason. I don't want to be giving like, hey, just don't do things when you don't feel like it. But I just want to be like, if you're going to do a bad job because you feel bad, don't do the thing.
Shane Thrapp: Yeah, that's your body saying, hey, you should rest.
William Curb: Yeah, just funny trying to find like the balance of like, yeah, because, you know, like as we're saying this tool like gives us this ability, a little push to be like, hey, I do want to do this thing. But we also need to respect our own body cues.
Shane Thrapp: And having this tool can kind of remind us that I'm not feeling too great today. So maybe I'm not going to do these tasks, like speaking on a podcast or something like that. But I'm still able to type. I'm still able to write. I'm still able to do these other things. So I'll just take these things off my task list and focus on these things instead.
William Curb: Yeah.
Shane Thrapp: And so it's just kind of another external tool to remind us that we can also direct our mental energies towards things that we can do when other parts of our lives we can't.
William Curb: Is there any final thoughts you'd like to leave the audience with?
Shane Thrapp: Yeah, a lot of you all may have heard us sitting here talking about this and you all are just like, oh, it's another tool I have to pay for. Here's the thing about Focus101.com. It's free. It will never not be free.
This is not one of those things where you go like Focusmate. You can only go to three sessions a week because, you know, you're limited on the free plan to so many. This isn't like Flow Club where it's a 14 day trial. It is free. This is why I want to help support this guy because his whole mindset is I want to provide this tool and I don't want to charge people for it because it's a labor of love. And even in the future, as we're kind of moving forward with this tool, the goal is still to make it affordable, even if you do wind up using a premium tier.
But it's going to be like a small base price. And then you can buy him a coffee. You can just donate to the organization. And you can do that even on the free tier. You can go ahead and give this guy a little bit of money to show appreciation for the work that he's doing. And that's all he really cares about. What he wants and why he built this platform is to give people, especially neurodivergent people, a tool that allows them to be able to go to one place, find people who are like them, find people who are looking for accountability and work with those people and start developing productivity systems that they need.
William Curb: Yeah, that sounds pretty good. All right. And if people want to find out more about you, you do some excellent coaching that I have gone through. So people want to find out more about you. Where should they go?
Shane Thrapp: Go to www.creatingorderfromchaos.com. You can set up an appointment there. Do a free discovery session, see if I'm worth your time. And then just move forward working with me as a coach. You can also find me at the Men's ADHD Support Group on Facebook. Come check us out. If you're a man with ADHD or autism and you want to find a support network, we're here for you. Awesome.
William Curb: Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. I think people really appreciate it.
Shane Thrapp: Thank you very much.
This Episode's Top Tips
Body doubling is a technique where we work in the presence of another person, even virtually, to help provide accountability. I can be effective at keeping us on track, reduce distractions and helps provide the motivation to stay on task.
We can make body doubling even more effective when we use tools like Pomodoros, alarms, reminders, and breaking our tasks down into smaller pieces. I also personally find the aspect of scheduling a particular time to do a task to be an especially important aspect of body-doubling.
As we discussed in the episode, Focus 101 is a free online tool for ADHD productivity combining features like body doubling, Pomodoro, and accountability groups.