Body Doubling for BD

By Kelly Caldwell

Here's a confession: I spent years trying to be the kind of person who blocks time for business development and actually follows through.

You know the drill. Tuesday afternoon, it’s on the calendar: 2-4pm: “BD time." You sit down with your carefully curated list of people to call, emails to send, ideas to nurture. You open LinkedIn. You stare at your screen. You think about how you should phrase that follow-up. You wonder if it's weird to reach out after three months. It probably is, so you check your email. You refill your coffee. You tell yourself you'll come back to it.

And somehow, two hours evaporate.

For the longest time, I thought this was a discipline problem – a character flaw, even. I envied – and still do, frankly – people who took to time-blocking like fish to water. 

As it turns out, I can embrace time-blocking for focused BD time – just not alone. When it becomes collaborative work, I can adhere to time-blocking with panache… if I do say so myself. 

What if we've been thinking about BD wrong?

Business development is inherently relational. It's about connecting with people, building trust, and creating opportunities for collaboration. So why do we treat it like a solo sport?

So often, advice on this sounds something like: "Block your calendar and make it a priority. Just do it."

Which is... fine. Except it doesn't account for the fact that some of us have brains that don't naturally stay on task when left to our own devices. Why hello, fellow ADHD’rs! Do you relate to me when I tell you that my brain is excellent at many things. Staying focused on a single task without external structure… that is not one of them.

Business development is particularly vulnerable to this. It's important – but it’s rarely urgent. It's open-ended. There's no hard deadline, no client waiting, no fire to put out… which means it's exactly the kind of work that gets endlessly postponed in favour of literally anything else that pings, beeps, or appears in my inbox. 

My brain runs on deadlines and dopamine. Give me a crisis or a clear deliverable, and I'll hyperfocus my way through it. But BD doesn't work like that. There's no due date. No obvious finish line. Just this vague instruction to 'stay visible' and 'build relationships,' which my ADHD brain interprets as 'do this never’.

Enter: body doubling

This concept comes from the ADHD community, but it turns out to be useful for everyone – like so many ADHD strategies – because distraction is a pretty universal experience.

The idea is beautifully simple: you do your thing while someone else does their thing, at the same time, in the same space. That's it.

Sometimes it's over Zoom. Sometimes it's side-by-side at a coffee shop. It can even be in a boardroom at the office, if your partner in this is a colleague. Sometimes you announce what you're working on. Sometimes you just nod hello and get to work. But you show up together, and yes, things actually get done.

It works because it creates external accountability and shared focus. When someone else is there – also working, also resisting the urge to check their phone or fall down a research rabbit hole – you stay on task. Not through willpower. Through presence.

What this looks like in practice

Last month, I had a colleague over to my place for two hours. She needed to draft a lengthy proposal and I had about fifteen email reach-outs that I needed to send. That is exactly the kind of outreach that's easy for me to start and then abandon halfway through when something shinier catches my attention.

We set a timer. We worked in parallel. We barely spoke.

When I finished one message and felt the urge to check the news, I looked up, saw her typing, and moved on to the next message instead. When she paused to grab her phone, she caught herself, glanced over at me working, and put it back down.

By the end: she'd sent the proposal and I’d sent every outreach email on my list. Neither of us had done anything revolutionary – we'd just stayed focused long enough to finish what we started.

That's the quiet magic of body doubling. It's not about motivation or willpower. It's about creating conditions where focus becomes easier. Where the presence of another person working keeps you anchored to your own work.

In-person vs. virtual (both work, but differently)

Virtual body doubling is great. You can even do it in your pajamas – always a plus, for me! You can find someone in a different city. You can squeeze it into a lunch break. Sometimes, it’s the only option and it is a good option. 

But in-person hits different.

There's a weight to physically showing up. When you leave your house, pack your laptop, and sit down across from another human being, you've made a commitment that's harder to quietly abandon. You can't discreetly open another browser tab. You can't multitask without it being obvious.

And when your attention starts to drift – when you find yourself thinking about that other thing you need to do or wondering what's happening in your inbox – there's someone right there, working. It pulls you back.

How to try it (if you're curious)

Find someone who also gets distracted easily or struggles with follow-through on open-ended work. It doesn't have to be someone in your practice area or even a fellow lawyer. It doesn't have to be someone with the same goals. You just need someone who understands what it's like to have important work that somehow never quite gets done when you try to do it alone. They get it. 

What makes a good body doubling partner:

• Someone who also needs accountability to stay focused (you want a peer in this, not someone who's already crushing it)

• Someone who won't fill the silence with advice or turn this into a brainstorming session

• Someone who respects the structure – they show up on time, do their own work, and don’t derail you

• Ideally, someone working on similarly open-ended tasks like BD, writing, outreach, or strategic thinking

Pick a time and place. A coffee shop. A library. A quiet corner of your office. A Zoom room with your cameras on.

Name what you're working on if you want. Or don't. Just show up and begin.

BD for BD (I didn't plan that, but it fits)

If business development is about building relationships, it seems odd that we're doing it alone.

Maybe the work doesn't have to be a solo endeavor.

Maybe discipline isn't about forcing yourself to focus through sheer willpower.

Maybe it's about finding the conditions under which you actually stay on task—and then creating those conditions on purpose.

So if you've been avoiding your BD work, or doing it in fits and starts, or finding that your Tuesday afternoon BD block somehow turns into email triage and calendar Tetris: you might not need a better system.

You might just need some company.