[eyelidlessness]

Surely it’ll depend on many factors: employees’ own preferences, level and sincerity of support-in-principle from leadership, actual working environments, relative distribution of remote vs in-person, level and burden of effort to accommodate mixed teams.

I also prefer remote (and have been remote probably 75% of my career). I’m also ADHD, and while I’d never even heard of ”body doubling” by name it’s something I’ve found helpful sometimes, under some circumstances.

For the minority of my career spent in office, it’s ranged from wildly productive (great team fit, good balance in favor of focus time) to hilariously counterproductive (excessive meetings and process ceremony, continuous interruptions whether ostensibly work-related or social, unbearably noisy).

For the times I’ve worked on mixed remote/office, I’ve generally felt my own and my teams’ productivity is great except when leadership found the arrangement objectionable (self-fulfilling prophecy I guess), or when team communications became challenging at scale (eg we found it hard to do “standups” with ~15 people in office and ~10 people on a screen; but realistically we shouldn’t have had that many people in any meetings).

[Riseed]

To add on to your "helpful sometimes":

As someone else with ADHD, I've found that one of the downfalls of "body doubling" is that it works both ways. Productivity can lead to more productivity because the body double can help me overcome the urge to research woodgas vehicles or the history of bread in Mesoamerica. But the double's lack of focus (e.g. being social, or forced meetings) destroys all focus because it's already enough of a task to manage my own executive functioning in a good environment.

The best balance I've found is remote work (so I am my only distraction), maybe with occasional in-person focused work sessions (à la hackathon), and occasional remote "body doubling" sessions with a friend or internet stranger.

TLDR: Solo remote work is better than attempting body doubling in an office environment, but remote "body doubling" is also occasionally helpful.