It me (or at least, this is what I like to tell myself):
A lot of the time, it looks like I’m fucking about, but I’m really just internalising the problem at hand, and clearing space for it in my brain.
I’ve done this and I can attest that it works, but I never knew it had a name.
Body-doubling is simply having another person in the room with you, working quietly alongside you. They can work on something similar, or something completely different.
I started a Twitter account, and fell into a world of good, dumb, weird jokes, links to new sites and interesting ideas. It was such an excellent place to waste time that I almost didn’t notice that the blogs and link-sharing sites I’d once spent hours on had become less and less viable. Where once we’d had a rich ecosystem of extremely stupid and funny sites on which we might procrastinate, we now had only Twitter and Facebook.
And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself. Facebook had become, well … you’ve been on Facebook.
Some good tips here. Mind you... I should really be writing instead of posting links to tips on how to concentrate on writing.