So… what’s the big deal about being super-busy or ultra-busy?

As you may have learned from the Home page, our focus is on finding solutions for people who handle more than one hundred tasks at any moment in time, or have nine hours or less of unplanned free time per week.

However, our two decades of research shows that you want the same things as other professionals. Confidence. Clarity. And above all else, Peace of Mind.

Also, like regular people, you want to be rid of the following complaints.

Here at 2Time Labs, we keep your overall goal in mind and balance it against the above complaints. But that’s not enough. Our work shows that the challenges faced by the ultra-busy person are distinctly different from others. Here are the highlights, known as the Five Pillars.

1. Ultra-Busy people realize that one size doesn’t fit all
They have learned from experience that they need to select their combination of apps, habits, practices and devices carefully. That which works for the average person (i.e. the majority) doesn’t work for them. In our work, we confirm this intuition with data, and show that their choice must be correlated with the volume of tasks they are trying to manage.

2. Ultra-Busy people know that they must always keep improving
They also know that they need to keep upgrading for as long as they plan to keep working. To them, the notion that there is some “final” or “permanent” solution is a joke. They know that as they push themselves to manage more tasks, and technology improvements continue to happen, they need new approaches. Furthermore, they have concluded that being flexible is a core competency: sticking to a single approach like a barnacle isn’t. To help, we have discovered that you must pre-plan your next improvement before looking for possible upgrades.

3. Ultra-Busy people ignore people who treat them like novices
Lots of the advice in the world of personal productivity is written for beginners, which is why so much of it is recycled. Ultra-Busy’s want to be taught like capable adults who have already mastered the basics. They need better, more advanced coaching based on a solid evaluation of their current skills. To address the challenge, we teach you how to perform this evaluation using our ETaPS method. (Evaluate-Target-Plan-Support as explained on the About page.)

4. Ultra-Busy people are tired of “anecdata”
They hate the fact that books and articles are written based on little more than a cool insight backed by one person’s experience. Instead, they want solid advice based on academic research, supported by rigorous experiments involving hundreds of people. For example, they know that time can’t be managed, and it bothers them to see people writing about “time management” as if it were possible. While we may use the phrase as a convenience, we start with an understanding that the phrase is a misnomer. Instead, our understanding of time-based productivity is built around the concept of a “time demand” – a psychological object with curious, exceptional qualities we each use every day.

5. Ultra-Busy people need support to make change happen
Unlike books and programs which ignore implementation, we teach you to build in more support for behavior changes than you think you need. It’s the only way to get over the “Superman Effect” which occurs at the end of training: you optimistically assume powers you don’t have in real life, leading to disappointment.

At your level of high commitment, a mistake in any of these pillars can be detrimental. You just don’t have the extra time others enjoy to recover from errors. Because you are moving so fast from one task to another, disciplined execution is an absolute requirement.

Entrepreneurs. Athletes. Executives. Performing Artists. You may not be working any of these professions but the demands on you are quite similar. You routinely create enough tasks that they consume your week, placing the onus on you to manage them expertly.

Given your aspirations, there simply is no alternative to doing so.

If any of this resonates with you and you’d like to learn more about 2Time Labs, its parent company Framework Consulting, and the people behind it, click here.