In this inspiring episode of Transform Your Workplace, Peggy Sullivan—keynote speaker, author, and consultant—takes aim at the busyness culture that’s burning out teams and leaders alike. Drawing from her book Beyond Busyness: How to Achieve More by Doing Less, she unpacks why constant hustle often leads to poor performance, disconnection, and diminished well-being. With humor and clarity, Peggy invites leaders to stop wearing busyness as a badge of honor and start making room for what really matters. Feeling the weight of your to-do list? Tune in and explore how simplifying your days can supercharge your leadership and reignite your joy.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Peggy Sullivan is a keynote speaker, author, and consultant who helps people and organizations escape the busyness trap to “achieve more by doing less.” Her latest book, Beyond Busyness, shares the proven, practical tools she’s used to inspire teams from Google to Bank of America.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
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🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
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A WAKE-UP CALL
Peggy Sullivan’s journey toward redefining success began with a moment many would find hard to forget. “I came home from work one day and I was exhausted like usual—another 12-hour day,” she recalls. In a haze of fatigue and autopilot, she mistook a bag of pistachios for a quick dinner, only to realize later she had eaten her cat’s food. That moment, bizarre and eye-opening, revealed how deeply she was stuck in what she calls “time poverty.” It became clear to Peggy that “there was no good recipe” for escaping the hamster wheel of constant busyness, even as she kept slipping back into old habits.
Determined to change, Peggy spent the next decade on a mission to understand how to live a life of value and purpose without sacrificing professional success. “I kept on asking everybody in the world… ‘What’s your biggest challenge?’ and they kept on saying, ‘I don’t have time for what’s important.’” What she discovered is that busyness is often worn like a badge of honor, but in reality, “busyness rarely equates to success. It rarely equates to productivity. It rarely equates to quality of life.”
Through years of testing her approach with companies like Google, Blue Cross BlueShield, and United Healthcare, she developed a proven system that helps people and organizations reclaim their time. She shares these insights in her recently-published book, Beyond Busyness: How to Achieve More by Doing Less.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Time Poverty
“As I discovered, people love being busy and they think that being busy is a good thing, but having time poverty, not having time for what’s important and being in a state of poverty, is usually not something anybody wants. So when you have time poverty and you don’t have time for what’s most important, you get to your end of your day wondering, ‘Where did the day go? Why didn’t I have time for this?’ My biggest priority of the day at work—I didn’t get to that. I just got interrupted, took calls, did email. I just had busy work all day. And so it occurred to me that ‘busy’ really wasn’t the word. You know, the words were ‘time poverty.’ And really the words were, ‘How do we achieve more by doing less?’”
What’s the Priority?
“Typically, people overstuff their schedules, and they have no time to actually do the work that needs to be done. So they wonder why they get to the end of the day. We’re really big on 24-7 communication, so we’re always looking at email. I had one person who looked at email 106 times a day. How can you get anything done when you’re looking at email that often? And so, it’s really about identifying that you don’t need to be doing certain things as frequently, but you do need to block out time for the things that are most important. And you ‘need to pivot’ and keep on redefining your priorities, because our world changes and what was important today often may change tomorrow morning.”
The Byproducts of Busyness
“When you look at loneliness and the epidemic that loneliness has in the country, when we’re busy, we tend to shut people out and we don’t make time for connection. And that has all sorts of health implications. The Surgeon General came out and said, ‘loneliness is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day.’ That’s the impact it has on your health. And so loneliness is definitely a byproduct [of busyness]. Lack of productivity is definitely a byproduct. You tend to do a lot of things [poorly]. Quality tends to really deteriorate. You lose your energy, your creativity, your zest for life, your positivity. The list goes on and on.”
Busy Isn’t Better
“When we multitask, it takes us three times as long and we have three times as many mistakes. We set ourselves up for chronic disease and brain fog and just all those things—lack of ability to problem-solve. […] You’re not a good leader when you’re over-the-top busy. You can’t empower and give your people the tools that they need and the support that they need to be a good leader. And even values—I think we have gotten away from a society that is truly value-driven, and everybody believes that their values are important.”
Making It Count
“We are often the last people to realize and to understand what low-value things we’re doing on a habitual basis. And the ‘busy barometer’—I worked with HR executives and industrial psychologists to look at a person from every single angle and what contributes to workforce productivity and happiness and engagement and a sense of belonging — and a lot of it was about people just not liking to spend their time doing things that have low value. Everybody wants to make a difference. And that’s why ‘subtraction’ is such a big deal—you can’t add more into something that’s already full. So you have to start by eliminating things, so you have time, energy, and resources to focus on what’s important.”
Finding Happiness
“We tend to think that happiness is this big thing that you need to work towards. It’s a destination, it’s a place, it’s a thing: when I get a promotion, when I get married, when I get a house. But actually, science shows that happiness is in the ‘micro-moments’—these small little joyous things that we do every day.”
Leading By Example
“We spend a third of our time at the workplace. There is a way to make the workplace productive, happy, healthy, engaging—a little less stress. So many times, people just think about stress, or they think about everything that they have to do. My challenge to all leaders is this: it comes from the top. And if you show your people that you’ve got this under control and that you aren’t a victim of time poverty, you actually create time wealth and have time for what’s important. Your people will follow, because they’ll see an example of somebody living life to its fullest potential.”
LEARN MORE
Visit Peggy Sullivan’s website or pick up her book Beyond Busyness on Amazon. With humor and heart, Peggy shares practical steps to help busy people reclaim their time, energy, and joy—one micro-step at a time.