This post is intended for a certain segment of the population, and after a few paragraphs you’ll know if it’s you (or someone you know).

Historically, I’ve had spectacular trouble getting normal, everyday things done: homework, chores, work projects, household maintenance, assigned reading, paperwork, personal goals, and setting the clocks back after a time change.

Nobody finds all of this stuff easy or matter-of-course. Life demands more than any of us can give. We each have to find a kind of equilibrium where we can tolerate ourselves, let some things drop, and get most of the important stuff done.

It’s been clear to me since childhood, though, that when it comes to the ability to meet those demands, the population exists on a bell curve, and I am on the left tail of it. I always marveled at how much normal, well-adjusted people get done. How quickly they dispatch an actionable thing – a form to fill out, an item to return — and how uncomplicated the question of doing it seems.

I don’t know how doing things feels to them, but to me it feels like I’m standing on a wobbly funhouse floor, with weights velcroed to my limbs and six different radio stations playing my in my brain.

This is not a complaint, only an observation. Only my own choices can contend with this problem. It’s a confluence of random and self-induced conditions: temperament, natural and learned work ethic, emergent chains of habits and coping mechanisms, neurosis, and repeated failures of will and courage.

This is all very human stuff that nobody escapes entirely. But as I said, there’s a bell curve for every set of talents and aptitudes, and you can’t live for more than a few decades without discovering where you sit on the most relevant ones.

Some percentage of you are my neighbors on this plane. There are items on your to-do list that have been there for years. You periodically send large batches of emails prefixed with, “Sorry for the slow response.” You take three weeks to do a thing some people do in a weekend.

You know the pain and humiliation of disappointing yourself and others again and again and again. You live with a sense that you haven’t quite begun your life, at least the life you should be living. And you’re always getting older.

The Good News

You might have discovered, as I eventually did, that your productivity challenges don’t mean you can’t get things done. They do mean you’re starting in a different place than will be assumed by schools, employers, and peers. You have to pick your battles more carefully, and employ unconventional tactics that most people don’t need.

The great upside to having serious productivity challenges is that most of your potential is untapped. If you do find approaches that can circumvent your worst sticking points, you have room for a kind of drastic and rapid improvement that most people don’t.

It’s hard to measure “productivity” precisely, but the degree of improvement I’m talking about isn’t in the range 30% or 50%, but more like 3x. I’ll explain why below, but I do believe that’s a reasonable target for a productivity-challenged person shoot for, and hit, in the short term.

A 3x improvement might sound crazy, especially to the middle-of-the-curve (i.e. normal) person who is using their time relatively efficiently and feels maxed out. But for the type of person I’m talking about – a catastrophically unproductive person who may currently only get ninety minutes of actual, intentional work done per day — a full tripling of personal productivity, even much more, is certainly feasible. There’s at least that much space, that much air in the cake.

Such a leap still might not make you a superstar — if the average capable normie generates 10 units of productivity in a day, an initial tripling might take you from a 2.5 to a 7.5 – but that’s still life-changing, and opens doors for steady, long-term improvement.

I should note here that some people’s productivity challenges are not a matter of inefficiency, temperament, or mismatched tactics, but rather injuries, degenerative conditions, and other hard constraints. I’m not talking about this group. I’m talking about the tens of millions of us that have made it deep into adulthood by white-knuckling it the whole way, knowing that we’re capable of much more, but have been unable to reproduce the standards and methods practiced by those around us.

Why some of us fall behind

If that sounds like you, a relatively quick, 3x leap is probably doable. I believe the problem for most of us is that nobody explicitly teaches us productivity as we’re developing. We’re expected to figure it out solely by emulating people around us.

This does work for most people — for the fat middle of the bell curve. But if emulating standard approaches doesn’t happen to work for you, due to eccentricities of temperament, cognition, or some other factor, well guess what – ordinary life is going to be extremely, stupidly hard until you find approaches that do.

For that reason, nobody without your same problems will be able to understand or explain why you struggle. The normal process of osmosis-learning worked well enough for them. They don’t see the water they swim in.

This is why seeking conventional productivity advice, which you’ve certainly done, is unlikely to fill the void. Popular productivity material overwhelmingly targets the middle of the curve, and it’s written either by high-achieving hustle-dudes pushing the human maximum, or high-achieving clinicians who understand productivity-challenge only as a second-person, theoretical matter. Both forms of advice are complex and long-winded, and require a significant capacity for consistent doing – precisely what you don’t have — in order to implement them. They don’t get it.

Getting out of the pit

An alternative to this high-investment, normie-catered approach is to try a variety of simple, unconventional tactics, most of which can be learned in 15 or 20 minutes and applied immediately. If one doesn’t meet you where you are, you can put it down and try another, having lost nothing. When one of them does click, things can change fast.

I’ve written about some of these moves here on Raptitude — the right now list, the block method, atomic accountability, cracking the egg, the velvet rope, and the cloud and the brick, to name a few.

The beauty of this approach is that it actually works for outliers and eccentrics. Some of the tactics will slot perfectly into a gap in your unique and eccentric brain, and make an immediate and lasting difference, sometimes a dramatic one.

If you find that the Right Now List, for example – learnable in 10 minutes — is a reliable way to begin half the tasks you’d normally put off, your productivity aperture widens right there and then, for good. You’ll get a few more things done that day, and every day after.

That one new move might allow another hour or two of real, intentional doing per day, which could already be close to a 2x productivity change for a struggling person.

A Place for Misfits

Earlier this year I put together a new website to promote this approach, which I named after my ebook How to Do Things. My goal is to find and gather these scattered, neglected eccentrics, and get as many of them as possible to 3x their productivity this year.

On the new site there’s a free resource available to anyone who subscribes to the email list, called 3 Secret Weapons for the Productivity-Challenged. It will teach you three of the best tactics I’ve got: the Right Now List, the Red Carpet, and the Block Timer, in about a half hour.

This blog post from How to Do Things is another example of the kind of simple, self-contained tactic I’m talking about.

I hope you enjoy the new site. Even you non-eccentrics would probably get something out of it. If you know one of the people I’m writing it for, please send them there.

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Desert photo from Zouhair Mazjoub. Egg chair, smartphone, and Christmas light photos from Freepik. Drawings by David Cain.