Evoke Greatness Podcast
Do you have an insatiable hunger for growth and knowledge?
Are you interested in hearing the stories of how successful people have navigated their journey towards greatness…all while stumbling through valuable lessons along the way?
My name is Sonnie and I am the host of Evoke Greatness, the weekly podcast driven by my curious nature and fascination with the champion mindset. I am a HUGE book nerd and a wee bit of a "control enthusiast" with an obsession for motivational coffee cups.
On this podcast, we share the ups and the downs, the highs and lows and all the lessons learned in between. It's my most sincere hope you hear something in one or maybe many of these episodes that resonates with you and reminds you that you’re not in this alone.
I believe that a rising tide raises all ships and I invite you along in this journey to Evoke Greatness!
Evoke Greatness Podcast
Time Poverty: Achieve More by Doing Less with Peggy Sullivan (Part 1)
🎧 Ep. 161 Time Poverty: Achieve More by Doing Less with Peggy Sullivan (Part 1) In this powerful episode, TEDx speaker Peggy Sullivan reveals her journey from "busyness addict" to creator of the revolutionary Busy Busting Process. Discover how to escape the hamster wheel of constant activity and reclaim hours of your week through research-backed strategies.
We explore:
- The shocking truth about time poverty and why 94% of professionals feel trapped by busyness
- How the average person wastes one-third of their day on low-value activities
- The first step of the Busy Busting Process: Subtraction
- Why micro-steps create sustainable change when massive overhauls fail
🔑 Key takeaways:
- Busyness triggers addictive dopamine responses, creating harmful cycles
- Using the Busy Barometer tool identifies your specific time-wasting patterns
- Small, consistent changes yield massive results (5-7 hours gained weekly)
- Breaking the busyness addiction starts with subtracting low-value activities
💡 Quotes to remember: "I'm a busyness addict in recovery... This busyness is controlling me, and I'm not controlling it." - Peggy Sullivan
"90% of people who take on this process get an average five to seven hours back per week." - Peggy Sullivan
"94% of the population is over-the-top busy, wants to be less busy, but they are clueless on how to add more meaning and value to their life." - Peggy Sullivan
🌟 Success Stories:
- How an executive slashed daily emails from 800 to 56 through simple process changes
- A VP single mother transformed her productivity with just 20 minutes of strategic self-care daily
Connect with Peggy:
Website: https://www.peggysullivanspeaker.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peggyasullivan/
TEDx: "Eliminating Time Poverty by Doing Less" (2024)
Book: "Beyond Busyness: How to Achieve More by Doing Less" https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Busyness-Achieve-Doing-Less%EF%BB%BF/dp/B0DGMPZTBG
A rising tide raises all ships, and I invite you along on this journey to Evoke Greatness!
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Welcome to Evoke Greatness. We are officially entering year three of this podcast and I am filled with so much gratitude for each and every one of you who've joined me on this incredible journey of growth and self-discovery. I'm Sunny, your host and fellow traveler on this path of personal evolution. This podcast is a sanctuary for the curious, the ambitious and the introspective. It's for those of you who, like me, are captivated by the champion mindset and driven by an insatiable hunger for growth and knowledge. Whether you're just beginning your journey or you're well along your path, you're going to find stories here that resonate with your experiences and aspirations. Over the last two years, we've shared countless stories of triumph and challenge, of resilience and transformation. We've laughed, we've reflected and we've grown together. And as we've evolved, so too has this podcast. Remember, no matter what chapter you're on in your own story, you belong here. This community we've built together is a place of support, inspiration and shared growth. Where intention goes, energy flows, and the energy you bring to this space elevates us all. So, whether you're listening while commuting, working out or enjoying your morning coffee, perhaps from one of those motivational mugs I'm so fond of, know that you're a part of something special. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your curiosity, your openness and your commitment to personal growth. As we embark on year three, I invite you to lean in, to listen deeply and to let these stories resonate with your soul. I believe that a rising tide raises all ships and I invite you along in this journey to evoke greatness.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to another episode of Evoke Greatness, where we dive deep with thought leaders who are transforming how we think about work and life. I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, peggy Sullivan, a renowned expert on combating what she calls time poverty, through her revolutionary busy busting process. In October of 2024, peggy delivered a powerful TEDx talk at Walden Pond titled Eliminating Time Poverty by Doing Less. Her message strikes at the heart of modern workplace culture Eat, work, sleep, repeat. It's a silent addiction keeping both individuals and organizations from reaching their full potential.
Speaker 1:Peggy's groundbreaking research reveals that a staggering 78% of people feel trapped on this hamster wheel of busyness. And, as the author of Beyond Busyness how to Achieve More by Doing Less she offers data-driven, actionable solutions to break free from the busyness traps and reclaim balance without sacrificing performance. Her insights have been featured in leading publications, including Time, forbes, entrepreneur and Bloomberg, and today we're going to explore her busy-busting framework practical strategies that empower people to achieve peak performance while maintaining health and joy. Peggy, welcome to the show. Thank you, I am so excited to be here. Well, I always like to kick off sharing a little bit about your story and what paved the path to where you are today.
Speaker 2:Well, I am a busyness addict in recovery Always been too much for me to do and too little time. I grew up and my father was an immigrant who had a strong work ethic, so I grew up with that and always working hard and climbing more and raising the bar, and I did that most of my life. And in corporate America I worked for amazing organizations that had thousands of people reporting to me and it was really great. But I reached a point where I had a post-it note on my table reminding me what city and what time zone I was in. But furthermore, I started having all these wake-up calls and I think the biggest wake-up call that I had was when I came home from work one day and I was tired.
Speaker 2:It was another 11 hour day and I go into the house and I'm hungry and I hadn't grocery shop. So I'm trying to find anything edible to eat and I land on a bag of stale pistachio nuts and I'm thinking to myself these nuts are salty, they're chewy, what's going on here? And then I feel this pulling on my leg and it's my cat Dazzle and he's basically like I haven't eaten in 10 hours either. So I throw some kibbles into his dish and I fell asleep on the couch. And I woke up a couple of hours later to this, this gagging noise, and I looked up and it was my cat Dazzle throwing up pistachio nuts. And I looked down and I realized I had remnants of pet food in my hand and that I was in such a burnt out haze that I ate pet food for dinner and didn't even realize it. Wow, and I love my fur baby. He's like a second son to me and I really put his health in jeopardy. But more than that, I just ate pet food for dinner and about six months later my husband walked out on me and he was basically like I don't know you anymore, we spend no time together, there's just no point in continuing our marriage.
Speaker 2:And then I had a stress-related heart attack and I ended up missing out on a promotion that I worked really hard on because I was in rehab, and it just got me thinking this busyness is controlling me and I'm not controlling it. And so I got really passionate about this whole concept of busyness, and I'm a research geek, so I did a tremendous amount of research to understand busyness and what I learned was a lot of data surrounding it where we think busy is better. It's a status symbol, it's a sign of success. The honest facts, reality, the data, all studies show that busyness is not good. It deteriorates your productivity, increases the amount of mistakes you make, your ability to connect humanly. It destroys your health. You end up cutting out things in your life, you love and whatever. And so I started thinking to myself why am I so busy all the time? Why am I doing this? I'm looking at the data and yet I can't help myself. It's always like one more thing, check that, check that box. And so what I learned was that busyness is an addiction and that we get a dopamine shot every time we get something done, so we want to do it over and over and over again. So I was like I'm not living my best life. I could be more productive, healthier, happier.
Speaker 2:I got to figure this thing out and at first it was just all about me and how I was going to get to it, and I started doing some market research and I started testing out different processes and I finally got something that worked really well for me. And then organizations and companies and individuals would come to me and say what has changed in your life? You look 10 years younger Now. You're doing great in your career, your relationships are thriving, you're smiling all the time, your relationships are thriving, you're smiling all the time. And that's when I decided that I wanted to share this process, that I had spent eight years speaking about consulting, about teaching, that I really wanted to share it with the world because it worked. What I find is that 90% of the people that take on this process get an average five to seven hours bath per week and I don't know about you, but five to seven hours like wow, that is, that's a whole nother day. It's a whole nother day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm fascinated by the language that you use around. When, with your TEDx at Walden Pond, it focused on eliminating time poverty by doing less. I would love for you to break down what time poverty actually means. And then, how does it manifest differently from regular time management challenges?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean time management, more productivity, more meaning, more purpose, you know, at work and in home. You know you just have to make some decisions and it's really hard to figure out what to say yes to, what to say no to and just how to manage your time. And so one of the first things I noticed is that we all spend, on average, one third of our day on low value activities. They could be something as simple as you spend too much time on email. The average person in the workplace spends one third of their time in, and only 30% are productive. You know multitasking the hope and the savior for all of us. You know, I once coached a woman who sent out an invoice for $11,000 that was supposed to be $1,100 because she was multitasking and it was a problem because she made the same mistake with multiple people. And so you know, I always love to teach people how to subtract low value activities. I put together something I call the busy barometer, which is just a three, four minute survey, and if you go on my website, you'll be able to grab it and take it, but it'll ask you a bunch of questions about your work habits, your health habits, you know, your communication habits and it will tell you what your lowest value activities are and make some suggestions on how to change them. And I'm a big believer that there's always a find the way. People always tell me oh, I got to go to meetings. And I'm like, actually you don't, and here's what you can do to not fill your day with meetings. So at five o'clock you're like okay, time to roll up my sleeves and do my real work. You know, there's always a way. My real work, there's always a way. And so the first step in the busy busting process is subtracting low value activities, and that's important. So you make room for what is important and what you value. And it can be as simple as changing one or two habits.
Speaker 2:I once coached this gentleman who managed 7,400 employees and he had an open door policy and so people were always knocking on his door and always sending him emails and he had no time to be strategic, no time to manage his managers. It was just really hard. And so what I said to him what would happen if you had a town hall meeting you know, a virtual town hall meeting where people could ask questions, and you dedicated 30 minutes once a week to that. You know, let's try that. Would that cut down all the email that you're getting and all the knocking on your door? And oh, by the way, tell your employees. You know I'd love to hear from you. If it's really important, pick up the phone. And or, you know, please don't CC the world just to cover your butt.
Speaker 2:And so he ended up actually eliminating. He used to get on average, 750, 800 emails a day and he, he, he eliminated them and got it down to like 56 emails a day. And so he was like there's no way I can't do this, I can't cut down on looking at email and I'm like there's always a way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Well, that resonates in a couple of different ways, but it deeply resonates around my line of work, which is taking care of people at the end of their life in hospice care and, as a ton of research has been done over the years, when people look back, their deepest regret at the end of life is not that they didn't spend more time in the office or spend time doing those things that were occupying their schedule with no real purpose. They feel like they didn't spend their time doing the really meaningful things with the people that mean the most to them. So that, like it, deeply resonates with my heart and my line of work. But I think those are questions that we should ask ourselves way earlier in life and not wait until when we're in our final chapter to look back on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I just I do workplace research every year and the workplace research that I just concluded which was from 2024, basically said that 94% of the population is over-the-top busy, wants to be less busy, but they are clueless on how and how to add more meaning and value to their life. And that's why I've always been really, really focused on, you know, making sure that people know the data and then there's an actionable process that they can do Micro steps, not major steps. Micro steps. You know one of my customers, sally.
Speaker 2:She always complained she didn't have time for self-care and she was a single mother with, you know, three children all under 12. She was a vice president of an international bank and she had no time for self-care. And one day she just had a meltdown. She was just so tired and so exhausted. She just chipped over laundry that had been sitting there for weeks and laid there and her daughter called me up kind of concerned about her mom. She says mom won't even open her eyes. So I get over there and she tells me, you know she's really depressed, no time for self-care. And I'm like, okay, let's start small. Can you give me five minutes tomorrow morning? Five minutes, that's it, five minutes. She says, yes, I can. I said you know, your day starts with your kids waking you up, jumping on the bed, asking for breakfast, putting their clothes out for school. I said what would happen if you got up five minutes earlier, had a cup of coffee? You live in Florida. Feel the sun on your face. She says I can do that. So she tried that and she felt that her mornings were a lot less stressful. So when she got to work she was like yeah, it worked until I got to work, and then work was just chaotic and there was too much going on there. And so I asked her about breaks and lunch. And she took no breaks during the day and no lunch. And she had told me she makes sandwiches and lunches for her kids and she doesn't have time to grab lunch for herself. And I'm like well, make a PBJ for yourself and go outside, feel that sun on your face and take a 10 minute lunch Doesn't have to be much. So all of a sudden she's up to 15 minutes a day. That's 15 minutes, and she's already starting to feel better.
Speaker 2:So then I check in with her a couple of weeks later and I'm like so what's going on? She says everything's great, but I'm not sleeping. I'm like, well, what do you do at night? And she says, well, I do my things to do list and I try to organize it. And I'm like, well, how big is your things to do list? She says, oh, it's usually 10 to 15 things done. And I said, well, how do you feel when you look at it? Overwhelmed, stressed, like I'm never going to get it done. And you're wondering why you're not sleeping. Why don't you change that habit? And instead, you know, start a journal, take a hot bath, you know, be grateful, count your blessings, do something different. And so I love that story, because she ended up carving out 20 minutes a day. But she became a better mother, her metrics at work improved greatly, she was healthier, she was happy, and it's these micro step things that we do that just make such a difference.
Speaker 1:I love that you share that, because that feel is the overwhelm. It just feels so big in like four minutes and when you can look at that and say, okay, how can I distill this into smaller micro steps so that it feels like something like I can actually take some action, even if they're baby steps, and then they feel the impact from a small output of action they actually get a bigger feeling of impact. And so I love that you break that down into start small, start with the baby steps, the micro steps. I'm a micro stepper.
Speaker 2:I love to do hard things, and the only way I can do hard things is when I do them in a micro step fashion, and I think that's really important. And yeah, and step two in the busy busting process is dealing with this busyness as an addiction, because we're all addicted to getting stuff done. And so what can you do to get that dopamine high? And I wrote my first book about happiness and the neuroscience of happiness. Your brain lights up neurotransmitters that send different cues to your body, basically saying be happier, have more energy. You know, be more charismatic. You know, fight off chronic disease, you're going to live longer. You know, your mood is going to improve. I mean all this stuff happens. And then I'm like, okay, so that's the neuroscience of happiness, what makes most people happy. And what I found was that people view happiness as a thing or a place or a destination, and I'm like that's all wrong, because then we can't control some of that stuff. You know, I'm going to be happy when I get to the weekend, when I'm on vacation. I'm going to be happy when I get the promotion. I'm going to be happy when I get a new car so I don't have to take the bus. I mean, you know too many of those things are just too hard. So what if we created happiness rituals? What if we did these three or four minute rituals during the day? And so I started doing that. My day, like mine, were like 11 o'clock and four o'clock and I also did a happiness ritual first thing in the morning, always a dance party with my fuzzy pink slippers and some really really great music at 11 am, no matter where I am, I eat dark chocolate, I smell it, I taste it, I close my eyes and it's like pushing the reset button. And you know, many times at the end of the day I'll spend it with my fur baby, just brushing him and listening to him purr, and it makes me so happy. And doing or doing something nice for somebody else. You know, I'll go to the grocery store and I'll pay for the person behind me. Or I'll go to get a coffee and I'll buy the person behind me a cup just random acts of kindness that ignite this like helper's high. So that's step two, what I call mojo making and creating intentional happiness rituals. And then the third step in the busy busting process, which is probably the hardest but the most rewarding, is really getting to know your values. Rewarding is really getting to know your values. What are your values?
Speaker 2:I used to think that values were this oblique thing and I would get up and I would talk about values and I would ask people and they would always say that you know, my values are super, super important to me, but I can't, but I just can't really figure out which ones are. I mean, and I speak on values and people would end up Googling or looking at their neighbors, like, what are your values? Well, those are good for me, you know, or Googling them. And so I thought you know what? I want to research values, but I want to understand what values make us feel like our cup is full, like, at the end of the day, we just feel fulfilled. So I researched about 20,000 people and asked them. You know, over a course of six months, you know what values make you feel like you lived a great day, and what I learned is that there were four of them.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a wrap for part one of Time Poverty Achieve More by Doing Less. With Peggy Sullivan, I hope you'll come back next week where Peggy reveals the remaining two steps of her busy busting process. She's going to unpack her groundbreaking research on happiness neuroscience and share the four core values that transformed thousands of lives, plus discover the simple three-minute happiness ritual that's more effective than a week of vacation. This might be the episode that finally breaks your busyness addiction for good. Thank you so much for listening and for being here on this journey with me. I hope you'll stick around If you liked this episode.
Speaker 1:It would mean the world for me if you would rate and review the podcast or share it with someone you know. Many need to hear this message. I love to hear from you all and want you to know that you can leave me a voicemail directly. If you go to my website, evokegreatnesscom, and go to the contact me tab, you'll just hit the big old orange button and record your message. I love the feedback and comments that I've been getting, so please keep them coming. I'll leave you with the wise words of author Robin Sharma Greatness comes by doing a few small and smart things each and every day. It comes from taking little steps consistently. It comes from making a few small chips against everything in your professional and personal life that is ordinary, so that a day eventually arrives when all that's left is the extraordinary.
