I Paid a Stranger to Watch Me Work: Three Weeks of Focusmate

Standard disclaimer first, because it matters: I'm not a medical professional. This is my experience, nothing more. What worked on my particular brain might do nothing for yours, and the opposite is also true.

So. Body doubling. If you've spent any time on ADHD TikTok lately you'll have seen it framed as something close to a magic trick. Just have another person present, the videos say, and your brain quietly switches on. "Body doubling changed my life" is practically a genre at this point. And I'm always a bit suspicious of anything that gets compressed into a four-second hook, because a content hook and an actual strategy are not the same animal. One is built to be shared. The other has to survive a Tuesday afternoon when you've got six dull emails to send and you'd rather do literally anything else.

I wanted to test the most concrete, most measurable version of the idea I could find. That turned out to be Focusmate.

What it actually is

Stripped of the hype, Focusmate is almost aggressively simple. You book a 50-minute session. At the start time you get put on a video call with a complete stranger, someone the app has paired you with, and you each say out loud what you're going to work on. Then you both just work, on camera, in silence. At the end you check back in and report how it went. That's the whole thing. Three free sessions a week, and you pay if you want unlimited.

I want to be clear about something before I go further. Nobody is paying me to write this. There's no affiliate link, no discount code, no "sign up with my link" anything. If there were, I'd tell you, and then I'd probably stop using it out of principle. I used the free tier for three weeks and that's what this is about.

The first session was genuinely awful

I'd built it up in my head as this calm productive ritual. It was not that. For 50 minutes I was hyper-aware of being watched, and instead of working I performed working. I typed things and deleted them. I opened documents I didn't need so I'd look busy. I kept glancing at the little webcam window to check the stranger, a man from Lisbon as it happened, wasn't watching me specifically. He wasn't. He was working, like a normal person. I was the only one treating it like an exam.

There is something deeply, fundamentally silly about a stranger several countries away watching you not-quite-write an email. I felt that silliness the entire time.

I almost didn't book a second one.

Then something shifted, but not the thing I expected

By the fourth or fifth session the awkwardness had mostly burned off. And here's the part that surprised me, and the part I keep coming back to. The thing doing the work wasn't the stranger at all. It was the clock.

The fixed 50 minutes turned out to be the entire point. A hard start time I couldn't drift past, and a hard stop I couldn't blow through. My usual problem isn't that I can't focus, it's that I can't begin, and once I've begun I can't tell when to surface. Focusmate bolts a start and an end onto a task whether you like it or not. The accountability is structural. It's a hard start, a hard stop, and the small public act of saying the task out loud to another human so it exists outside your own head. That's the mechanism. Not magic, not a person's presence reaching into your brain. Scaffolding.

What it helped with, and what it absolutely did not

Let me be specific, because vague endorsements are useless.

It worked well for admin. Boring, single, well-defined tasks. Filing things, replying to the email backlog, renewing stuff, the kind of low-stakes drudgery my brain treats like wading through wet sand. Having a stranger and a countdown made those frictionless in a way nothing else has.

It did nothing, and I mean nothing, for two categories. The first is anything needing actual deep thought. Writing this post, for instance, would have been worse in a Focusmate session, because real thinking needs me to stare at the wall for ten minutes and that looks, on camera, identical to slacking off, so I'd have started performing again. The second category is anything I was avoiding for emotional reasons rather than boredom. A webcam can't make you open the letter you're scared of. The avoidance there isn't about focus and a stranger from Lisbon can't fix it.

The access bit, which nobody mentions

You need a working webcam, a quiet-ish space, and the nerve to be on camera with a stranger. None of that is free, and the last one especially. If you live in a shared flat, or you don't have a room you can be alone and a bit awkward in for an hour, this is just not a tool that's available to you. The TikToks never say that. They show someone in a tidy home office with good light. Worth naming.

And there's a wider UK-shaped thing sitting under all of this. This is exactly the kind of unglamorous scaffolding you end up cobbling together for yourself while you sit on an NHS waiting list with no actual support in the meantime. You're not getting strategies from a clinician. You're getting them from each other, from trial and error, from being a bit desperate. Focusmate isn't a solution to that. It's just one of the things you reach for in the gap.

The verdict, such as it is

I kept it, but only for the admin sessions. I dropped the hype entirely. It is not a personality, it did not change my life, and the bit of TikTok framing that sells it as a near-mystical presence effect is, as far as I can tell, just the clock wearing a costume.

But it partly worked. That's the honest verdict and it's the bit that mildly annoys me. I went in expecting to write a tidy debunking of the embarrassing webcam thing, and instead I have to report that the embarrassing webcam thing helped me clear two weeks of admin I'd been avoiding for a month. Suspicious of how well it worked, still doing it anyway. Make of that what you will.