October is ADHD Awareness Month and 23 days in I’m finally, officially joining the party with a guest post by my yourADDanswers friend & coach, DeShawn Wert.

Sure the title is attention grabbing, but the ADHD productivity strategy behind it is pure gold, so I couldn’t resist asking her if I could share it with y’all, ’cause who doesn’t want to know how to get their neighbor to clean their fridge. As usual, the always generous DeShawn said “yes”.

How I Got My Neighbor to Help Me Clean My Fridge

You heard me. My neighbor came to my house so I could clean my fridge.

What incredibly persuasive skills did I use to entice her over to my house, you may be wondering.

• Is she my paid cleaning lady? I wish!
• Do I have a deep secret on her that she doesn’t want her husband to find out and I’m extorting her? Absolutely, not. (They are lovely, wonderful people.)
• Is she some kind of clean freak with a mission to purge the world of dirty fridges? Nope. I don’t think so.

She is a kind, generous person whom I like and trust whole heartedly. We also have a hard time finding a time of day we can get together because of life’s busy schedules. So I asked if she’d like to come over one day and visit while I cleaned my fridge. She said “yes” and I found a body double who would help me get started on a project that I had been putting off for over three months.

This underused strategy, called body double, is an excellent way to accomplish boring and mundane tasks (a real form of torture for ADDer’s). Let me tell you what it is and what it is not…

• It’s not someone ‘standing in’ for you getting your work done for you, that is your responsibility.
• It’s not someone telling you “how” to do your task, you can do this by yourself, it’s just painful.
• A body double is a person who will sit in the room with you and do something else (talk, read, or work on an unrelated task) while you finish your task.

When You Need A Body Double is a short post from Attitude Magazine that describe when and how people with ADHD can use a body double to help get those boring, mundane, tedious, pesky tasks off their task list.

So remember, the next time you are procrastinating with an item that you need to accomplish but just can’t seem to get done, your body double is out there. You just need to find them!

After years of teaching in public schools and her ADHD diagnosis, DeShawn launched a business of her own, Your ADD Answers Coaching and Consulting. “I am able serve clients all over the world, helping them to understand their own unique brain and how it functions for them.” She addresses ADHD on her website – Your ADD Answers – where you can also find out more about her coaching services. DeShawn also writes for ADD Student, a blog that supports parents as they work with schools in supporting their students.

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After I read DeShawn’s post, I thought back to times I’ve unknowingly used the “body double” strategy – cleaning out the storage closet and reorganizing the Christmas decorations when my college roommate visited from PA, setting up the nursery with my friend and her two daughters. This week I put the strategy to work with my two mini ADDers, so I guess you’d call it body tripling.