There's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from working hard, but from never quite feeling like you've worked on the right things. You finish a full day, maybe a long one, and yet the projects that actually matter haven't moved. The inbox is cleaner, the meetings are done, but the needle hasn't shifted. 

Cyril Peupion has spent two decades coaching executives on exactly this problem, and his diagnosis is consistent: the issue is the gap between where leaders want to go and what they actually spend their time on. 

In this episode, I sit down with Cyril, author of Work Smarter, Live Better and his latest book Less Achieves More, to work through his practical framework for closing that gap. He has trained more than 5,000 people across 19 countries. 

Cyril and I discuss: 

• Why high performers prioritise by impact rather than by deadline, and how to train yourself to do the same 

• The quarterly big rocks process: how to choose two or three genuine priorities and find the courage to subtract everything else 

• The weekly planning ritual Cyril recommends, including why you should look at your big rocks before you ever open your calendar 

• The ideal week exercise that helps leaders reclaim 40% of their time without guilt 

• How to plan for the unplanned by deliberately blocking reactive time in your day 

• The four Ds (delete, decrease, defer, delegate) for handling the urgent stuff without sacrificing what matters most 

Key quotes 

"If you work 10 hours a day, you cannot plan 10 hours per day. It's a recipe for disaster." 

"I'd rather start my planning from the ideal and then adapt it than start my planning from an open sheet and let everything take control." 

Connect with Cyril Peupion on LinkedIn and his website. Check out his latest book Less Achieves More. 

If this episode resonated, I also recommend my conversation with Sabri Suby on the subtraction method, where he shares how he ruthlessly outsources anything that isn't his highest value work. You can listen here.