I’m a father of four kids, with four dogs, four cats and one wife, and I work about 70 hours a week. I used to feel great under 180 pounds. Once I went over 180, I felt like crap. Then suddenly, one day, I was 238 pounds. I didn’t like what I saw, how I felt or how I acted.
My first instinct was the one most leaders have: do more. But with that household and 70-hour weeks, there was no time. So I stopped adding busyness and looked at productivity instead.
Eating 1,200 calories a day takes less time than eating 2,000, so I started eating less. Then I realized small meals and snacks could happen during work calls instead of a half-hour break to go eat. That shaved more time. I reinvested the savings into a little meal prep, so the food was even better for me, and into working out.
Forty pounds later, I’m getting closer to 179 again for the first time in years. I didn’t add one minute to my day. I got a lot more done. That is working on your productivity.
Your business works the same way, and this isn’t a diet plan; it’s the pattern this article is built on. Fewer calories and no meal breaks were the activity I cut. Meal prep and workouts were the reinvestment, my version of long-term planning and productivity planning. The result came without adding an hour.
Short answer: Busy is not a business. Activity is what you do; productivity is what that activity earns. So stop planning to grow your activity 10% a year. My rule for 2027 is the reverse: shrink your activity by 10% a year, grow your productivity by at least 20% a year, and reinvest the time you free up in planning how to focus on the work that makes you the most money. The scoreboard is profit per minute, not hours logged.
- Why Is Busy Not a Business?
- Why Shrink Activity 10% and Grow Productivity 20%?
- How Do You Maximize Profit Per Minute?
- Why 20% a Year Is the Floor, and 20% a Quarter Is Coming
- Doesn’t More Productivity Mean More Hours?
- How Do You Set 2027 Goals Around Productivity, Not Activity?
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Keep Reading
- About the Stagnation Assassin
Why Is Busy Not a Business?
A full calendar proves you spent time. It does not prove you made money. Customers, shareholders and your own bank account pay for outcomes, not motion. When next year’s plan is “do 10% more of everything,” you are budgeting for activity and hoping profit shows up on its own. It rarely does.
I learned this the hard way, and somebody who watched me learn it put it in writing. In the foreword to Stagnation Assassin, Dan Valenti, former SVP/GM of KitchenAid, described working with me at Whirlpool. I was “perpetually on two calls at once, sprinting between meetings, and juggling priorities across multiple fronts.” Then he wrote the sentence that matters: “But being the busiest man at Whirlpool wasn’t the same as being the most effective.”
He was right. The difference between activity and impact, between scattered intensity and focused intensity, is one of the foundational insights behind Stagnation Assassin and the frameworks in it: the Karelin Method, the 80/20 Matrix and the Kill List. If you want the full breakdown of the two, I covered it in the difference between activity and productivity. This article is about what to do with that difference when you sit down to plan 2027.
Businesses fall into the same trap people do. In one transformation I led, a shopping cart plant’s manager told me with complete confidence that the plant was at 72 percent capacity. Charts on the wall confirmed it. Machines were running and operators worked full shifts. Leadership believed it needed a multi-million dollar expansion. I spent a week on the floor with a stopwatch, a notepad and a clipboard. Value-adding production was 31 percent of total time. Organizations see busy resources and conclude they are maxed out. Busy was hiding the truth.
That is why I put it this way in 10-Minute Transformation (forthcoming from Koehler Books, February 2027): “The way out is not more effort; more effort deepens the pit.”
Why Shrink Activity 10% and Grow Productivity 20%?
Because adding activity compounds cost and complexity, while cutting it frees the one resource you cannot buy more of: your time. My rule is simple. Every year, shrink your activity by 10% and grow your productivity by at least 20%. Then reinvest the 10% you saved in long-term planning and productivity planning, not in more doing.
Look at how most annual plans get built. More sales calls. More meetings. More projects. More products. More reports. The plan grows activity by 10% because activity is easy to count and easy to assign. Nobody owns the other direction, so work accumulates in one direction only, a problem I dug into in what you should stop doing.
Reverse it. Shrinking activity by 10% means fewer things on your plate: fewer standing meetings, fewer low-value tasks, fewer yeses to requests that do not move the business. It does not mean less focus or less intensity. It means the intensity lands on less, so it lands harder.
The math on subtraction is better than people expect. My Weekly Kill List works like this: every Monday, list your top ten priorities, rank them by impact, and cross out #8, #9 and #10 in thick red ink. Post it publicly.
Eliminating 30 percent of priorities creates 42 percent more time on the remaining 70 percent. The test: if you’re not saying no to genuinely necessary things, your list is wrong. Todd Hagopian, Stagnation Assassin, Chapter 3
Apply the same arithmetic to a 10% cut and the remaining 90% of your work gets about 11% more time. Week 7 of one turnaround, my own Kill List included attending an industry conference, upgrading ERP reporting and exploring an adjacent market. All three were valuable. None were critical. Killing them freed more than fifteen hours for priorities #1 through #7. You can see the full method in my guide to implementing a Weekly Kill List.
Why reinvest the 10% in planning?
If you spend the freed time on more activity, you have just traded one pile for another. The 10% is your planning budget. Use it for two kinds of thinking that never fit into a busy week. Long-term planning: where the money will come from two and three years out. Productivity planning: which tools, processes and outsourcing will let you do the important work faster. Both are ways of planning to increase your focus on the things that make you the most money. Without that protected time, new priorities stall fast; I’ve watched it happen on a schedule, which is why priorities die by week three.
How Do You Maximize Profit Per Minute?
Profit per minute measures what your time earns, not how much of it you spend. You raise it by putting more of your minutes on the customers, products and decisions that create the most profit, and fewer on everything else. That requires saying no to good things so you can say yes to great things.
That trade sits at the heart of the Karelin Method. Its focus factor asks you to spend 80 percent of your time on the 20 percent of activities that matter most. As I wrote in Stagnation Assassin, it sounds simple, “but it’s rarely executed because it requires killing good things to do great things.” Traditional allocation spreads time democratically. If you are lucky, maybe 30 to 40 percent goes toward critical activities, because “everything matters.” For a sports version of the same trade, read how Edwin Moses won 122 straight races by making every stride count.
The profit data shows why that spread is so expensive. At one division I analyzed every customer-product combination with actual transactions, 1,847 of them, using activity-based costing. Seventy-four combinations, about 4 percent, generated 140 percent of the company’s total profit. The other 1,747 destroyed 50 percent of it. Every minute spent serving the wrong combinations had a negative profit per minute, and traditional accounting hid it. That recursive cut is what I call 80/20 Squared, and I walk through how to run it in how to find the 4% that drives 64%.
Saying no is how profit per minute goes up in real time. On Day 47 of one turnaround, sales wanted 400 engineering hours for a Q4 customer, one of the value destroyers in the 80/20 Matrix. In the Morning War Room, the answer took ninety seconds: “Standard product only for Q4 customers. No custom work. Next.” Ninety seconds versus three weeks of meetings, and 400 engineering hours never went to a value destroyer.
A practical test for every request on your desk in 2027: does this minute go toward the 20 percent that makes the most money? If not, it is a good thing, and good things are what you say no to.
Why 20% a Year Is the Floor, and 20% a Quarter Is Coming
With AI, software and cheap outsourcing, there are more productivity tools available than ever, so a minimum 20% productivity gain every year is my baseline expectation, not a stretch goal. In the new economy, as new tools keep arriving, I believe you’ll find productivity needs to rise 20% every quarter just to keep pace.
Here is what 20% looked like before today’s tools. At one turnaround, we achieved 22 percent efficiency gains through mundane improvements.
Standardized setup procedures saved thirty minutes per changeover across four daily changeovers. An automated quote configurator turned three-hour spreadsheet exercises into twenty-minute tasks. Decision trees for the fifteen most common technical problems reduced engineering interruptions by 60 percent. Nothing revolutionary, but all compounding. Todd Hagopian, Stagnation Assassin, Chapter 3
Every one of those gains came from removing friction, not from heroic effort. Now look at your own week and ask which spreadsheet exercises, recurring reports, first drafts and routine questions could be handed to software, automated, or outsourced. If 22 percent was available from mundane fixes then, a 20% floor is conservative now.
Two pieces of math explain why I push the quarterly bar. First, improvement multiplies, it doesn’t add. Three 20% gains are not 60%; 1.20 × 1.20 × 1.20 is 1.73x. That is the logic of the productivity multiplier formula. Second, 20% a quarter compounds: 1.20 × 1.20 × 1.20 × 1.20 is about 2.07, so a team that hits it every quarter roughly doubles its productivity in a year. A competitor still planning 10% more activity is not in the same race.
Doesn’t More Productivity Mean More Hours?
No. More hours is just more activity wearing a productivity costume. In one turnaround I tried seventy-hour weeks. Quality dropped, mistakes rose and burnout followed. Once I enforced a fifty-hour maximum, the team produced more output at fifty hours than at seventy, with better quality. For a team, productivity works best inside a boundary.
The correction was a hard boundary. I sent people home at 5:00 p.m. if they’d hit their limit, used Morning War Rooms to eliminate wasted time and used Kill Lists to focus effort. The company went fifteen months without a burnout departure, and engagement recovered to twelve points above baseline. I tell the whole story in why 50 hours beats 70 hours of work.
A confession, since I opened by telling you I work about 70 hours a week: fifty hours is a rule I have for my employees, and one I often find myself breaking for myself. Even so, my own fix was never more hours. It was productivity: I didn’t add one minute to my day, and I got a lot more done.
The research backs the instinct. Stanford economist John Pencavel’s study of British munitions workers found that below a threshold, output rises in proportion to hours, and above it, output rises at a decreasing rate as hours increase. In Stagnation Assassin I boil it down to one line: forty-eight hours with focus beats eighty hours with chaos.
One clarification, because the words overlap. In the Karelin Formula, “activity” is your focused hours, and the target is about 48 of them, with 50 hours as the guardrail. The 10% you shrink in 2027 is the other kind of activity: the scattered tasks, meetings and yeses that eat those hours without earning anything.
How Do You Set 2027 Goals Around Productivity, Not Activity?
Write every 2027 goal as an output per unit of effort, not a volume of effort. Start with a Kill List to cut at least 10% of your activity, put the freed hours on the calendar as planning time, measure your productivity multiplier, then set a minimum 20% annual gain and check it every quarter against a 20% quarterly bar.
Planning season is when activity goals sneak in, because they are easy to write and easy to beat. If you are setting your number now, read why “under promise, over deliver” is loser advice first. Then work through this worksheet. It takes one sitting.
The 2027 Productivity Worksheet
- List your activity. Write your top ten priorities and every recurring commitment: standing meetings, reports, reviews, calls. This is your 2026 baseline.
- Cut at least 10%. Rank the priorities by impact, not urgency and not by who is asking loudest. Cross out #8, #9 and #10. Then go through the recurring list and stop enough of it to remove at least 10% of the hours your week spends on activity. Write down who was doing each one and what the hours go to instead.
- Reinvest the 10% in planning. Put the freed hours on your calendar as two recurring blocks: long-term planning, and productivity planning. In the productivity block, ask one question every time: which AI tool, software or outsourcing option could do this work faster or cheaper?
- Measure your multiplier. Calculate your Intensity Multiplier from Stagnation Assassin: Activity (weekly focused hours ÷ 40) × Efficiency (1 + your planned improvement) × Focus (percent of time on your top 20% of activities ÷ 20%). The target is 1.20 × 1.20 × 4.0 = 5.76x. Below 4x? Find the factor that needs the most work. Most of the gap usually lives in focus.
- Rewrite every goal as productivity. Not “more calls,” but more revenue per call. Not “more projects,” but more profit per project hour. Not “more hours,” but more output per hour. If a goal can be hit simply by doing more of the same thing, it is an activity goal. Rewrite it.
- Set the bar: 20% a year, checked every quarter. Commit to a minimum 20% productivity gain for 2027. At each quarterly review, compare your progress against a 20% quarterly bar and ask which new tools arrived since the last review. Short cycles keep the goal alive, which is why 90-day goals beat resolutions.
- Protect it weekly. Run a fresh Kill List every Monday. Hold a fifteen-minute standing Morning War Room and decide blockers on the spot with the 70% Rule: 70% of the information plus 70% confidence means decide now. Treat 50 hours as your team’s strong default: a guardrail, not an iron law.
When you are done, your 2027 plan should be shorter than your 2026 plan. That is the point. A shorter plan with a bigger productivity number is a business. A longer plan with more activity is just a busier year.
It is the same move that took 40 pounds off me. I didn’t find more hours; I cut the activity eating my time and reinvested the savings in meal prep and workouts. Do the same with your 2027 plan: cut first, reinvest in planning, and measure what each hour produces.
If you want to run this with your leadership team before the plan is locked, I teach it as a keynote and workshop: the Karelin Method keynote. And if you want the full frameworks behind it, get my books.
For a defensive take on time, see my Time Traps review.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does “busy is not a business” mean?
It means activity and results are different things. A packed calendar shows you spent time, not that you created profit. Customers and shareholders pay for outcomes. If your plan for next year is simply to do more of everything, you are planning for motion and hoping profit follows.
Why shrink activity by 10% instead of growing it?
Because extra activity adds cost and spreads your focus thinner, while cutting it frees time for the work that matters. My rule is to shrink activity 10% a year, grow productivity at least 20% a year, and reinvest the freed time in long-term planning and productivity planning.
What is profit per minute?
Profit per minute is what your time earns rather than how much of it you spend. You raise it by moving more of your minutes onto the customers, products and decisions that create the most profit, which means saying no to good things so you can say yes to great things.
Is a 20% productivity increase every year realistic?
With AI, software and cheap outsourcing, I treat a 20% annual gain as the minimum. At one turnaround we got 22 percent efficiency gains from mundane fixes like standardized setups, an automated quote configurator and decision trees. In the new economy, I expect the bar to move toward 20% every quarter.
How do I set 2027 goals around productivity instead of activity?
Run a Kill List to cut at least 10% of your activity, schedule the freed hours as planning time, calculate your productivity multiplier, and rewrite every goal as output per unit of effort. Then commit to at least 20% productivity growth for the year and review it every quarter.
Keep Reading
- What’s the Difference Between Activity and Productivity? The busy trap, and how to audit your week.
- Implement a Weekly Kill List The Monday habit that does the cutting.
- How to Calculate Your Productivity Multiplier Fast Hours, efficiency and focus, multiplied.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is VP of Product Strategy and Marketing, the founder of Stagnation Assassins, and a business transformation author and speaker. Known as The Stagnation Assassin™, he has led transformations at Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, and Whirlpool that generated $3B+ shareholder value across five turnarounds. He is the author of Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto and The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Your 2027 plan is either an activity plan or a productivity plan, and you probably already know which. Run this check tonight: could every goal on it be hit just by doing more of the same work? If yes, it is a busy plan, not a business plan. Bring me in to speak to your leadership team before the plan is locked, or get the full playbook in my books.