Author: 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.

A self-described serial entrepreneur, since finishing her Masters Degree in English, Kelly has built a successful career consisting of a portfolio of Professional Services roles. That portfolio includes having spent over a decade in real estate services, over 2 decades in media and communications, in roles as diverse as writer, creative director and publisher in the magazine space, and nearly 3 decades in marketing and brand consulting. 

 Among Kelly’s latest passionate interests is the use of AI—both personally and professionally. She’s becoming ever more immersed in the AI space, continually learning and searching for ways that she and other business professionals can harness this evolving technology to create greater efficiency and enhance the experience they provide to their clients..

Kelly’s delighted to bring her diverse skills to Southren Group. She’s currently involved in coaching and personal brand development programs for lawyers and real estate professionals. Her coaching style is warm, empathetic, and engaging—she trained with the NeuroLeadership Institute. Kelly has a keen interest in identifying and developing successful strategies for coach neurodivergent clients—an area to which Kelly brings personal and unique expertise.

Outside of work, Kelly spends a great deal of time with her daughter and their menagerie of pets. Her hobbies include photography, gardening, and travel.