The 3-Step System for Simplifying Your Work and Life

The Art of Manliness

Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of Axios and co-author of 'Simplify,' shares a three-step system—confront, delete, amplify—to combat modern

Key takeaways

• Our instinct is to add solutions rather than remove inefficiencies, leading to increased complexity.
• AI can be a force multiplier but only if used mindfully; otherwise, it creates more noise and work.

Main topics

• The three-step Simplify system: confront, delete, amplify
• AI's role in increasing complexity despite promises of efficiency

Notable quotes

"If you don't have a system to figure out how to simplify what you're focusing on, inertia and complexity just take over... like awful cancers."

Conclusion

Simplifying life and work requires intentional discipline—confronting inefficiencies,

Transcript preview

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We think it looks really great and we're very excited about it. Visit artofmanliness.com to check it out and be sure to view it on desktop or laptop to get the full experience. Now, to celebrate this redesign, we're giving away AOM stickers completely free. to subscribers of the AOM newsletter. If you're not a newsletter subscriber yet, visit artofmanly.com slash newsletter and sign up. Not only will you get free stickers, but the newsletter is a great way to keep up with the content we put out on AOM and improve your life each week. Hope you enjoy the new website and thanks so much for the support. Now on to the show. Speaker 1 (2:57) When people are faced with problems and complexity, our instinct is to add instead of subtract. As a result, we have a tendency to make our work and our lives more and more complex and less and less effective and fulfilling. Even when what we add is new technology that promises to make us more productive, it often only seems to bog us down and give us even more to do. My guest says that to fight this drift toward complexity, especially in the modern age, you got to be ruthless about cutting out the superfluous and focusing on what's most important. His name is Jim VandeHei, and he's the co-founder and CEO of Axios and the co-author of Simplify. Today on the show, Jim explains how to simplify your work and personal life using a three-step process, confront, delete, and amplify. We discuss how to identify the slop we're all inundated with, and he's not just talking about what's generated by AI, rules of thumb for what to say no to, why you should spend more time developing your strengths than fixing your weaknesses, and the importance of getting clear on what you want out of life, both personally and professionally. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash simplify. All right, Jim VandeHei, welcome back to the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having me back. You got a new book out. It's called Simplify. It's all about how to simplify your work and your life. There are lots of books out there about simplifying. Why do you think the world needed another one? Speaker 2 (4:20) Yeah, I think you're right. I think there's a lot of people who've written about how do you bring more efficiency to your life. The reason that I think this book is timely, the reason that we did it, is I think that artificial intelligence is going to make the need for simplicity maybe 100 times more important. I'm seeing it every single day in my life, every single day in the work that we do here at Axios, that basically we've hit a point where everything is becoming so complex at work. so complex outside of work that if you don't have a system to figure out how to simplify what you're focusing on, stop doing the dumb things you shouldn't be doing and amplify the things you both want to do and that you're good at doing, I do think inertia and complexity just take over kind of like awful cancers. They spread. Speaker 1 (5:07) How are you seeing AI increase the amount of complexity in our lives? Because the idea, the selling point is AI is supposed to simplify our lives. I think with time, Speaker 2 (5:17) AI might simplify our lives. I think in the short term, it is the greatest complexity creation machine ever created. And let me say why. Because think about it at work. Like, yes, if you really know how to use it with great expertise and you're one of the 1 % where it's a true force multiplier, it probably saves you time. What is actually happening on the ground is now everybody can do better presentations. Everybody can write more detailed memos. So everybody is. So suddenly we are all getting lit up with more presentations, with more emails, with more context, with more ideas at a time where we have less time to actually focus on it. So unless you're really careful and you think about this almost like a system or an operating system or a mindset. you're just going to end up in a bigger complexity trap than you were already caught in pre-AI. Speaker 1 (6:13) Yeah, I've seen it in my own work. So we get a lot of PR emails from people who want to be on the podcast. And I'd say in the past year, the amount of those emails that we've gotten have increased probably 10x. And I think it's AI. Speaker 2 (6:29) It's all AI. And again, that's one example across one small part of your workday. For most of us, we're getting hit with that from a hundred different directions. You add that up and you end up wasting so much time. Like the reason we wrote this book, I am not somebody, I think we talked about this a couple of years ago. I have no sort of egotistical scratch to itch in terms of writing books. You know, I've reached a point in life, I'm 55, I've had some successes. I won the lottery with my family. So like I'm playing with house money and I want to like spend my time. Like how do you be useful to others? And I think this book is useful. I love that word useful. I think about it with content. I think about it with time allocation. I just want to be useful and I think the book is useful. Like when we write a book, it's because we've done something that we put into practice and that I've seen have a transformative effect on me or my company. And we rolled out Simplify, this idea, two years ago at our company. And the results are truly astronomical. Like we went, I went back and looked. Our budget two years ago was to have about 750 people. and to do way less revenue than we're doing right now. We have 425 people, I believe, and the average revenue per person is up 75%. And I truly attribute that to the simplify mentality. And what I mean by that is we went through the company and we literally ruthlessly looked at what are the things that we do that we can just stop doing. And then what are the things that we do uniquely well that we can amplify the hell out of it? And to do that, we created this three-step process, which is just confront, delete, amplify. Confront is what are we doing? Why are we doing it? Delete is make delete and know the most powerful. words in your arsenal and just stop doing stuff, kill anything that's not adding value, anything that creates friction, anything that is just done because we've always done it that way so that you can get to amplify the things that you actually do exceptionally well. One of the cool things that we did is we make every single employee down to rank and file. Anybody who's just starting or has been here forever. Now we're doing it on a monthly basis, right down in order of importance. the three things that you need to do to crush your job this month. One, two, three. Then write down the three things that you do that you think are dumb or that shouldn't be done. In order. One, two, three. And then the three things you think could be automated using AI. Almost no person does that. Almost no company does it. But the minute you do it, you can then sit down with your manager and figure out, are these actually the three things I should be doing? And then the three things you're talking about killing. At least your manager has to confront like, why are we doing them? In most cases, what we find is people are just doing them out of habit. They're doing it because we always did it. And they didn't really want to raise their hand and say that this is stupid or wasting me time. The minute you kill those things, productivity soars. But it's not just productivity because who really gives a shit? That's kind of the business advantage. Your personal satisfaction soars because you stop doing the chores you don't want to do and you have more time to do the things that you want to do. And that's why I think that this mindset, this idea of simplify and doing twice as much with half the work is so important at this very specific moment because I just can't. envision a time in my lifetime and therefore anybody's lifetime where we've had more stuff, more choices, more things that distract us. And the one thing that is crystal clear from the science, the more decisions you have to make, the crappier decisions you make. Speaker 1 (10:12) Yeah, I want to get more into the framework because you have some great examples from it and some brass tack things. But just sticking on this idea of complexity, even before AI, things had a tendency to get complex. Why does that happen? I imagine most people don't start an initiative or in business or an organization thinking, I want to make this the most complex, confusing thing. Why does complexity nonetheless creep in? Speaker 2 (10:37) Yeah, I don't think people do it out of laziness. They don't do it out of stupidity. It's just a defect in our species that we just have this tendency to complexify, to make things more complicated, particularly the longer. that we do it. It's why every organization ultimately becomes a bureaucracy. It's why every government, the bigger it gets, the worse it functions. The reason that the more stuff you have in your closet, the harder it is to decide what to wear. It's just something about us that we assume more is better. And we often equate action with like smart activity. And it's a bad human habit. And that's one of the things I've discovered starting and running companies is that if you don't have a system to defeat. the worst of your habits, you'll never defeat it. The first book we did was Smart Brevity, about how to write smarter and quicker and in a more efficient way. And it ended up being revolutionary for people who did it. But it was because you had to see that there's this bad habit, long-winded writing that wasn't helpful. And you had to have a corrective measure, smart brevity, which was the measure that we outlined in that book. And that's the way that I look at simplify. In some ways, simplify is smart brevity on steroids applied to every aspect. of your life. Speaker 1 (11:48) I think you tie like this study, this sort of this tendency for us to add instead of subtract. I think there's a study that you highlight in the book where researchers gave people this puzzle where the solution was you had to take something away, but everyone always just wanted to add something. We don't default to subtract. We always default to add. It probably Speaker 2 (12:07) goes back to like our hunter-gatherer instincts that we just think we need more and more is better. More is survival. But the evidence is so clear that all of us get, you know, what they call sort of cognition fatigue, this idea that the more decisions you make, the worse the decisions will be ultimately, because we only can make so many sharp decisions with our brain not feeling exhausted, even if we realize it or not. It's the reason it seems silly, but like it is the reason that Jensen Wang or Rachel Maddow or Barack Obama. or Mark Zuckerberg, why all of them have very limited clothing choices. Like all of them have talked publicly about they limit the number of clothes or colors that they have so they can reduce the amount of decisions that they have to make. in the morning. And it seems small, but I do a version of this with, really, there's only one brand of shirt I have, one brand of jean. Mainly because the more I have, I lock up. I realized this a decade ago. I would sit there, probably, I realized it 20 years ago when you had that craft beer explosion. I love the hell out of beer. But when I go and stare at this refrigerator full of 400 beers, I just lock up. There's too many decisions. There's too many choices, right? And so you've got to figure out a way to reduce the number of choices. You've got to delete things. You've got to increase your capacity to say no and realize that every little bit that you do in your life or you take away frees up time to do stuff that's actually rewarding and brings us benefit. And ultimately, that's what all of us want. Speaker 1 (13:44) You have a whole chapter dedicated to slop. You don't just mean AI slop. What's your definition of slop? And what are examples of slop that creep into our work and lives?