Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast. 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 or 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, in 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 aom.is/simplify. All right, Jim VandeHei, welcome back to the show.
Jim VandeHei:
Great to be here. Thanks for having me back.
Brett McKay:
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?
Jim VandeHei:
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 a hundred 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.
Brett McKay:
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.
Jim VandeHei:
I think with time, 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. 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.
Brett McKay:
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.
Jim VandeHei:
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. The reason we wrote this book, I am not somebody, I think we talked about this a couple years ago, I have no sort of egotistical scratch to itch in terms of writing books. I’ve reached a point in life, I’m 55, I’ve had some successes, I’ve won the lottery with my family. So I’m playing with house money and I want to spend my time. 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.
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. 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 rank and file, anybody who’s just starting or has been here forever, now we’re doing it on a monthly basis, write 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 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 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.
Brett McKay:
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?
Jim VandeHei:
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 worst 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 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.
Brett McKay:
I think you titled this study, 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.
Jim VandeHei:
It probably goes back to 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 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 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. 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 that 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 like 400 beers, I just lock up. There’s too many decisions, there’s too many choices. And so you’ve got to figure out a way to reduce the number of choices. You 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.
Brett McKay:
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 working lives?
Jim VandeHei:
If anybody’s listening to this and you take the time just to think about your day, take one day and dissect it, your day is like 60 to 70% slop. And what I mean is just like stuff that gets dumped on your plate that you probably shouldn’t be dealing with, don’t want to deal with, someone else could deal with it. And a lot of it, again, it’s not done intentionally. We talk in the book about make work or Stuart Butterfield from Slack had that great term about sort of like human-like activity. It seems like you’re doing work, but you’re just making work. And every time you make work, someone else has to do that work. And most work at work is just stuff you’re doing because someone else set something in motion that maybe never should have been put in motion. So there’s AI slop, which is just a bunch of words that were added because AI is very good at words.
That’s one thing. But the other slop that I think is even more insidious is just like the work slop that gets piled out of bad habit and inertia, habit and inertia. Those things are so powerful. Even at my company run by me who’s obsessed with this, if I’m not doing a monthly or even more frequent kind of inventory about what are people doing and why are you doing it, we revert to habit. We revert to inertia. The number of times that people say, “Well, I do this because five years ago you said we should do this.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I changed my mind like four years ago. I didn’t realize this is still cooked into the system.” And that’s true at every company. And that’s why this isn’t like a shame on you, you are dumb, you made things complex. We all make things complex.
You just have to admit it. We all have this tendency, but if you don’t do something about that, that complexity is just going to strangle you. It’s going to make it so hard for you to do the stuff you want to do at work and do the stuff you want to do outside of work.
Brett McKay:
So meetings can be slop, reports can be slop. You have this great example from AT&T where this guy comes in as CEO and he realized that there were thousands of company policies or something, and he just started going through them and saying, “All right, what can we cut?” And the reason why they accumulated, like you said, someone 10 years ago said, “Well, we need to create this policy for this reason.” And it just stayed forever on the books. It stayed as a rule or operating procedure, even if it wasn’t useful anymore.
Jim VandeHei:
The guy’s name’s John Stankey, CEO of AT&T, one of the oldest companies in the US, a workforce that’s well over a hundred thousand people. And he came in and he’s become a simplified zealot and he realized they have 8,000 different policy declarations that are official to the company. He said he couldn’t name 10 of them and he became militant about like, “I want to kill all of these.” And he’s got it down to 400 and he’s trying to get it down to single digits. And what Stankey calls it is, “The borg.” And the borg is just all of the stuff that gets encrusted and all the barnacles that get built up inside of a company that become bloat. And all they do is they prevent people from doing the fun electrifying work that they should be doing that makes them enjoy their work and makes the company more profitable.
And what Stankey’s admitting is kind of what I’m admitting or what Mark Zuckerberg at Meta admitted. They basically went through this, they called it the year of efficiency, but when we talked to him, talked to his team for the book, they talk about it in kind of the same simplified mindset. What they realized is that every time that they reduced a layer and reduced managers managing managers, their productivity went up and their internal satisfaction scores for employees went up. Well, why? Because they stopped doing the things that deep down, maybe subconsciously, people realized they shouldn’t be doing and they were focusing on the stuff that they want to do and their stock price bounced up and they became a better company.
Brett McKay:
And in your personal life, slop accumulates clothes, like you mentioned, you buy clothes and then you haven’t worn something in three years, but it’s still in your closet and you’re like, “I got to get rid of this.” Or just stuff you do with your family. A lot of families feel really rushed and harried and they never take a look at their calendar to ask, “Why are we doing this thing? Do we really need to do this activity? Probably not.”
Jim VandeHei:
Yeah. And I think in the book, I talk a little bit about this. I do it and I’d recommend anyone else do this. Nobody ever even steps back to say, “I’m going to take 20 minutes today and I’m going to think, what do I actually even want out of life? When I’m on my deathbed, what do I want to be able to say I accomplished or I achieved or I became?” And write it down. What are the three things you want out of life? And then use that as a filter for, okay, when I do have free time, am I achieving these things or am I just becoming a prisoner to habit or a prisoner to what everyone else wants to do? Or just, I don’t know, I’ll just do this because I’ve not put any thought into it. And I do think the principles of simplify work even better at home.
We walked through how you could do this with your diet, how you could do it with your wardrobe, but I do think it’s just this mentality of taking the time of why do we do this? Is this the best way to spend our time? All these things that I buy in the household, aren’t there ways that I could just automate this so I’m not having to spend any time thinking about this cereal versus that cereal? There’s technology that does this for free. All of us have access to it through Uber Eats or whatever other app that we’re using. We might not take advantage of it and it might seem small or trivial, but if you do five, six, seven, eight of these things, you suddenly have more time to do the things that you actually want to do. And that’s really the spirit of the book is trying, how do we liberate ourselves to do all the things that you have to do to be a responsible human, but free ourselves up to spend way more time doing the things that bring us joy and reward.
And that’s not selfish. I think everyone else around us benefits when we’re happy and we’re doing stuff that makes us feel energized.
Brett McKay:
Let’s talk about this process, kind of drill down a little bit more. So the simplify process, like you said, just three words, confront, delete, amplify. With confront, you argue that a lot of people just don’t even get to this point. And I think people listening are probably thinking, well, yeah, this makes sense. If you get rid of the stuff that you don’t need to do, your life will be better. But why do most people not even get to that point?
Jim VandeHei:
Because life’s busy. We’re all busy. The average person’s getting, I think what is 150 emails a day, 130 texts a day. That doesn’t even account for your Tinder alerts and all the other people calling you and wanting your time. So I don’t think most people reckon with how much our brain is getting pounded with incoming stuff all day, every day, which gives us less time to spend any time reflecting on like, okay, I’m a prisoner to all of these alerts and all of these updates and all of these emails and all of these texts, but just what should I be doing? What do I want to do? That’s why confront is the first thing. Just take the time at work, at home, with your diet, with your exercise. Just confront what is it that I’m doing and is this actually the thing I should be doing?
Just doing that has a radical shift, right? I always look back when we wrote smart brevity, one of the big aha moments and the thing that really seemed to resonate with readers and then people when I did a speaking tour on this is no one even stopped to think about before you ever write anything, just take one minute to, why am I writing this? What do I want this person to take away? Could I just articulate that in one nice crisp sentence? Just that mentality shift of taking the time has such an effect on us. So just taking the time to confront what are you doing? Why are you doing it? Which then opens you up to this concept of delete, just like what can you get rid of? Can I stop doing a meeting? Can I block a bunch of these emails? Can I stop buying 600 different brands?
Can I stop doing these things at work that I know I shouldn’t be doing, but I keep doing them because I just assume I want to do them and I’m embarrassed to talk to my manager? In the book, we talk about this study by Microsoft that the average worker spends at least 25% of their week doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing. Think about that. Let me do the math. That’s three months a year. That’s 2.5 years a decade. Imagine if you had that time back and you use that time for stuff you should be doing or wanted to be doing. Not only would you not be doing stuff that you found to be a drag, you’d be doing things that bring you more satisfaction, probably more salary, maybe more promotions. That’s a lot. And to me, that feels worth it. That feels like, okay, if that’s the payback, I’m going to confront.
I’m going to look at the things I can delete so that I can amplify the things that I want to do.
Brett McKay:
So with this confront, I mean, this is something I think would be useful. Maybe you just set aside time once a week, look through your schedule from the past week and think, what was the stuff that I did that I probably don’t need to be doing anymore? But it sounds like too, in the book, you do this as a continual process. It seems like every time you’re doing something, you’re confronting it and it’s like, do I need to do this?
Jim VandeHei:
But you don’t have to be a maniac about it like I am, but I would argue you should be doing this weekly at least. Again, I’m not saying that you’ve got to go off and meditate and become a monk. You just have to spend like five or 10 minutes even just looking at your schedule. Do I need to be doing these meetings? Do I need to? Could that meeting be a phone call? Could that meeting be an email? What are the things that I’m doing this week that I don’t need to do? What are the things I’m doing at home? Even looking at your personal schedule, I just always did that. Do you need to be doing that because maybe that’s an hour you could be working out or reading or doing stuff that you find brings you enjoyment. It’s more just getting into that habit.
This all flowed from, I do take it further. I have what I call my happiness matrix, which is I kind of know the things that I care deeply about, whether it’s my family, my kids, my work, my hobbies like hunting and fishing, my health, my workouts, my faith. And I know if I feel off, it’s usually because I’ve not actually confronted am I spending enough time on the things that matter most? And that always has helped me reset to make sure that I am doing that. A good example is I made the decision years ago that I think one of the most important things to me is not to actually have a wide circle of friends. I want to have deep, deep relationships and individual relationships with my children, my wife, my parents, my siblings, and a very small number of friends. Well, to do that, I had to delete a lot and that meant I live in DC, I run a media company.
You could imagine the social stuff that I could be doing. I almost never do anything socially for work in DC. I take that time instead to allocate it towards those family members and my kids so that I can amplify the time I’m spending on the thing that by the time I get to my deathbed, I want to be able to say, I was a really great dad. I was a really great husband. I was a really good sibling and a really good son and a really good friend to a small group of people. That matters profoundly to me, but I took the time to think that, oh, that’s one of the most important things. I confronted that, that required me to delete a lot of things in my life so that I could amplify the things that matter.
Brett McKay:
I’ve done that in my own life. Mine was early on in my career, I would do speaking engagements where I have to travel. And at first it’s always great to get invited to speak because it’s like, oh wow, I feel important. But then I realized I live in Tulsa, there’s no direct flights to a lot of places. So for me to go to someplace like Washington, it’s basically three days because one day’s for traveling there, then one day is the event, and then the next day is the travel back. And I’m like, I don’t want to do this. My kids are young. I want to spend time with them. I can’t get that back, so I don’t do speaking anymore.
Jim VandeHei:
But that’s a great example, right? I mean, one, it’s admirable that you did it, but two, you go back to when you initially made that decision as someone who also does some speaking, you have it in your head like, well, that’s what somebody who does when they have a podcast or they have an idea or they run a media company, you do speaking, but no one ever takes the time to be like, well, do I have to do speaking? And what is the cost of me doing speaking? And the cost is usually time and exhaustion. And only then can you decide, oh, I’m going to make the hard decision of deleting that so that I can then spend that time doing the stuff that I want to do. I just think most people are like a piece of wood floating along a river and going where the current takes it because there’s just too much going on.
We don’t have time to evaluate. If there’s one big takeaway from this book is take more control of your calendar, take more control of your mind. And I guarantee you, if you do, you’re going to be a happier, more satisfied person. If you don’t, you might still be a happy and satisfied person, but most likely you’re kind of going to be a prisoner to complexity and habit.
Brett McKay:
Speaking of the delete, do you have any rules of thumb on what you say no to or use the delete key on?
Jim VandeHei:
I mean, I’m pretty ruthless about my schedule. And again, it’s small things and you could say, Jim, you’re the CEO, so you get to do what you want, but I think most people can do this. A couple things. One, I’ll almost never take a 30-minute meeting at most. I’ll say 15, unless there’s a real something meaty that needs to be discussed. I don’t know why I would ever need to spend that much time on a topic. And I have a rule of, I think I’m a nice guy. If you see me outside of work, I’d love to have a conversation about you and your life. At work, I don’t do small talk. So if a meeting is at 10:00, we’re not going to do updates. I’m not going to hear about your weekend. We’ve got to do business and so I can get you in and get you out so you can go off and do the stuff you need to do at work.
So I’m very ruthless about the time that I have. And a lot of that is because now being a CEO, I have to free up a lot of time just to think, right? My job is to make really good decisions for the future of the company and then bring people along. So I have to constantly delete. So if it’s not something that’s family related, if it’s not something that is keeping me in a good intellectual and spiritual place, if it’s not something that is totally vital to the company, in all likelihood, I’m saying no to it. And I will say as someone who, and this sounds boastful and I’m not, and I know I have some level of privilege because you’re a CEO, but I run a company, I’m writing a column, I write books and I still do some speaking, but I still find an hour every day to work out.
And I’m militant about going fishing and hunting or being outdoors or hiking on a very regular basis for my own sanity. But the only reason I’m able to do all of that stuff is because I have been more rigorous about having a system to get rid of stuff that I shouldn’t be doing and really putting the onus on trying to find things that do amplify what I’m good at, what brings me joy and what will ultimately make me feel like I’ve lived the life I wanted to live.
Brett McKay:
As a rubric in deciding whether you should say yes or no to something like an invitation to go to a party or whatever, you suggest asking the following three questions. Question one, will I enjoy the company of at least one of the people at the event? If the answer is no, skip the event. If the answer is yes, continue to question two. Question two, will I enjoy this event personally or grow professionally? No, skip the event. Yes, continue to question three. Question three, will my attendance take away from other goals, skip work, lack of sleep, no workout? Yes, skip the event. No, attend the event. So I think that’s really helpful. Another simplifying technique you suggest is something called the handcuffs tactic. What’s that?
Jim VandeHei:
I mean, what I’ve realized in running companies, so much of it is because people’s instinct is just to keep doing more or to develop habits that you have to figure out ways to put handcuffs on situations and basically limit the choices that people can make or force them to think about why are they doing the things that they do. A great example of this was just one of the origins of smart brevity was I though most stories were way too long-winded and I basically set a mandate, your stories can’t be longer than X number of words. And unless it was a firm number, people would violate that and they would waste their time because they ended up wanting to write 2,000 words, right? And so it’s small, but if you don’t do that, you won’t get the result you want. I constantly ask all of my leadership team to tell me the things that they’re doing that they can kill, that we could just stop doing.
And I do that because if I don’t do that, they’ll just keep doing it because they feel like they’re doing the right thing for the company and they’re busy and they’ve not taken the time to confront things. So you have to have these little handcuffs thing. One for me for diet is it took me a long time to figure out what should I be eating and drinking that makes me healthy, but my handcuffs are I just have very much limited the types of food that I eat. So I have one of two things every single morning. I have the exact same thing for lunch every day and I have a mixture of four different things at dinner and it makes it easier to make sure I’m kind of eating what I know I need to eat. It eliminates the amount of stress of deciding what I’m going to have that night.
Those things start to add up little by little, those handcuffs.
Brett McKay:
I eat the same thing every day too. Hasn’t changed in 10 years. My dad was the same way too. Every morning it was special K and coffee. That was it and he still does it. Let’s talk about this amplify. So this is all about after you’ve deleted all the slop from your work or your life, it’s about focusing on the good stuff, the strengths. And you make a big case for instead of focusing on your weaknesses, you should be spending more time on what you’re good at. Why is that?
Jim VandeHei:
Well it’s not just me making the case. There’s really good data on this that basically you get a much better bang for your buck when you’re focusing on the things you do well rather than trying to fix the things that are broken. The corporate leadership council did a study of 20,000 white collar professionals and it showed the power of amplify that basically if you force people to focus on their strength, they become way more productive and you see much bigger gains than by attacking their weaknesses. And so a lot of the delete and no is to put the emphasis on the things you’re actually good at. And even there, I don’t think most people do that at work. Most people, could you even say, “Here are one, two, three in order, in hierarchy, here are the three things that I think I do best at work.” Just writing those down.
Because if you worked for me, then I’d say, “Well, great. Then how do I make sure that you spend almost all of your time on one and two and three?” If those are things you’re really good at, I need you doing a lot of that. There’s many things that I’m fine at, but I try to stop doing anything I’m fine at because there’s usually somebody who’s better than me at doing the thing I’m fine at. But what is it that I do that is uniquely good and work on amplifying that. And you just see such great results from doing that because it’s not just that you end up doing better work and your company benefits. It’s like you psychologically light up. You’re doing the things that you know you want to do. You know that you’re sort of sharpening the things that you’re naturally gifted at, and you’re doing that by purging the things that you’re like, “I’m not that good at this or I don’t know why I do this in the first place.
I don’t know why the company does this in the first place.” That stuff has a really negative psychological drain on us. We might not realize it because it becomes just habit, but it really does. Just think about it. How do you feel when you’re doing something you enjoy and you’re good at versus when you’re doing something that you don’t like doing at all, you don’t feel great about it.
Brett McKay:
The analogy that I like is it’s like a garden. Instead of spending your time pulling weeds, spend more time planting flowers because it looks nice, but also there’s no room for weeds to grow.
Jim VandeHei:
I love that. It’s very true. But again, to do that, it is about the thought. And it seems so simple because you started this thing with like, well, there’s a lot of books about different aspects of simplify, but I think there’s not necessarily a book that I’ve seen that gives you a real system in real time to apply it. That’s why we end every chapter with very specific questions to ask yourself or very specific tasks that you could do. Even this exercise in the work section, this idea of just take 10 minutes today and what do you want out of work? When you think of work, if you think about work, most people in their adult years are going to spend 75% of their time, their waking time, working, going to work, bitching about work, thinking about work. 75% of your time. Have you ever thought for 20 minutes like, “Well, what do I want to get out of that?
What would make me feel like I really, really had achievement?” And have you ever written those down? And then have you ever taken another 15 minutes to write down, okay, if those are the three things I want, what are the three things I need to be doing now or doing in the year ahead to actually get there? Oh, wow. Okay. Now you have a map, you kind of have the steps you need to take. Now you have a great frame to figure out what should I delete and what should I amplify? And just having these written north stars, I don’t have to be written, maybe just remember it. As a writer, I tend to write everything, but just having that frame of where do I want to go? What do I want to accomplish? What can I stop doing? It’s such a beautiful liberating exercise.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. That idea, the chapter on the career plan I thought was really useful because I thought, yeah, you need to have a career plan. But I think most people don’t have a career plan. They’re not thinking five years or 10 years where they want to be. Or if they do, they put off creating a career plan for themselves because they think, well, I got to go to some workshop or take some course. And you say, no, just make a list of three things you want to accomplish with your career in the next 10 years.
Jim VandeHei:
For sure. I’ll give you an example. When we left Politico to start Axios, I’d obviously been doing this exercise in the back of my head. And one of the things I sort of reached a point in my life where I was like, okay, I’ve had success. What do I want? Well, one of the most important things to me was I just want to do really interesting things with people I genuinely enjoy. And that, okay, whoa, I took that time. I wrote that down. Well, you know what that did? It affected how we set up the entire company. It affects the type of people we’ll hire and fire. We now have a culture where we really do purge people who just aren’t that pleasant to work with, no matter how talented they are. But I wouldn’t have had that template at work had I not put the time to think, okay, that is really important to me because I realized that maybe it’s a flaw in me, but I get really drained and down by people who do the wrong thing for the wrong reason, even if they’re super talented.
Some people have a tolerance for it. I don’t. And I was like, I’m in a position to do something about it. Now that might be a bigger thing because I run a company than your average person would be able to do, but we all have that. And I think you just need that north star. You have to have that in your mind or you’re going to drift.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. You make this point in the book. A lot of people think, well, I’m not a CEO. I don’t have that much control about what I do. If the boss asks me to do this report that I think is dumb, I got to do the report. But you said that’s just an excuse. So if you’re not a CEO or a manager, how do you apply these principles in your life at work?
Jim VandeHei:
I think very easily. I think any person can write down what I said, what are the three things I do in order that I think I’m best at and bring the most value and then the three I shouldn’t be doing. Any person can do that. And I’d be shocked if any manager would recoil if that person said, Hey, can I have a conversation with you? I did this exercise and I just want to make sure that I am focused on the things I should be focused on. I want to raise the three things that I don’t know if I’m that great at and I don’t actually understand why we do it so we can have a conversation about it. Any person can do that. If your manager doesn’t engage on that, that’s a big red flag. You might want to be finding a new job in the next couple of years, but most managers aren’t.
They’re going to want to engage on that. So anybody can do it. Yes, you have less control. It might be your manager says, just do it and you’re going to have to keep doing it, but at least you’ve gone through the exercise of okay, I now know the three things that are most important to me. In the time that I do control and everybody controls at least some of their day, almost everyone does, how do I spend more time doing those three things? Just that little exercise and over time you’re going to see, okay, now I ended up being much better at my job, which will put you in a much better position salary wise or for promotions. Most companies are meritocracies, but it requires some level of self-discipline and some level of self-accountability and self-direction to make sure that you are at the top of the list.
Brett McKay:
Communication can take up a lot of people’s time at work. I think that’s where things get most complex. If I look at my work life, that is the thing that causes the most mental drag because there’s 20 different places people can contact me. There’s a Discord server, there’s email, there’s this app and that app. How can you apply the simplified process to how we communicate at work?
Jim VandeHei:
Yeah. I mean, it’s my obsession, right? I think people are terrible communicators and I agree with you. It’s the biggest problem at most workplaces because people aren’t great communicators. The difference you can make as a communicator is just think about who you’re communicating to. How can you serve that person and what is the quickest, most efficient way for you to explain what you’re trying to explain or ask what you’re trying to ask? So many emails, so much communications is long-winded, meandering because people didn’t think about what is it we’re trying to achieve? Why does it matter? What’s the next step? So most communication should be a hundred words, not a thousand words. Most things can be solved very quickly and you just need to take the time about what is the most efficient way for me to convey what needs to be conveyed? Because you want to be that person that when someone gets a text or someone gets an email that subconsciously and consciously, they want to read the text or open the email.
You don’t want to be the person where they roll their eyes and scroll past your email because you’re long-winded, because it’s not clear what you’re trying to say and because you’re completely indirect. You want to be the person like, oh, I want to open Jim’s email. He always tells me exactly what this is about. He always explains why it matters and it’s always clear what the next step is. That is what you need to do. And I think every company needs to do that. Otherwise, God, I go into some of these companies. We have a side company that does consulting for big businesses, Fortune 100 companies and smaller on how to communicate more effectively. And it’s just awful. A hundred different email styles, people long-winded, doesn’t make sense, antiquated formats, expecting people to go into an internet, which what any person with a heartbeat and a life would want to go to an internet to find something.
All these weird things that we do out of corporate habit, you can tell the common string here is like, how do you defeat bad corporate and personal habit? You’ve got to have a system.
Brett McKay:
Let’s take this to the personal life. You’re really big on people having a master life plan and a life foundation. What are those concepts and how do you keep that simple?
Jim VandeHei:
Yeah, it goes to that idea we talked about a little bit earlier about just kind of what do I want to get out of my life and then thinking about, okay, if those are the things that I want to get out of life, what do I have to do? A good example is, okay, one of the things that Jim wants out of life is I love being active. I love being vigorous. I want to be able to have a long time to be able to play with my kids and my kids’ kids and be active and mobile in my 80s, my 90s. And I’ve got this thing called ankylosing spondylitis. So over time, my spine will want to harden into one bone and it could make things difficult. And so, okay, if that’s what I want and this is the obstacle I have, how do I simplify my focus so that I can still achieve what I want to achieve?
Well, that means I probably need to carve out an hour a day to work out and make sure I maintain my flexibility. It means I need to be pretty vigorous about my diet to make sure that I can keep as much fat off of pressing against my spine so that if there is arthritis, I have less pain. That then says, okay, if I need to do that, I’ve really simplified, like we talked about with the diet, how do I make sure that I can adhere to that each and every day? And again, you could say Jim’s neurotic or that’s a little too much, but I think you have to have that. You have to have this approach of what is it that I want? And then how do I stack my time as best I can on the things that we can control so that I can achieve the things that I want to achieve?
And I do think you have to work backwards, like what is it I want out of my life? What is it I want out of my health? What is it I want out of my relationships? Then from that flows the other kind of more trivial, superficial things of how do I organize my closet or how do I set things on auto order or how do I stop doing things socially that I’m just doing out of habit? Those other things flow from having kind of that north star. And I think you have to have a north star for work and one for your life. I think that the two kind of go hand in hand. I think that I’m better at work when I’ve got my stuff together outside of work and I’m better at home when work is not that stressful. So I think you have to think about both of those.
And again, this is not a self-indulgent gospel, right? It’s much more about how do you just live a really good, productive, satisfactory, joyful life. And I think you’ve got to have that system. You’ve got to have those stars.
Brett McKay:
So we’ve talked about how AI is making things more complex, contributing to the slop, but you talk about there’s ways you can use AI to simplify your life. What does that look like? How have you been doing it at work and in your life?
Jim VandeHei:
Yeah. I mean, I use artificial intelligence a ton for sure. I use it at work and I use it at home. And again, I think it requires pretty deep thought on the front end to make sure that it’s not a slop creator. And so a couple of things where I found it to be quite helpful is I put all of my health information into ChatGPT. Everyone has to make a judgment on their comfortability doing that, but I find it to save me a ton of time when I’m thinking about supplementation or I’m trying to figure out what happened with a blood result or is there any latest research on spondylitis that I should be thinking about as I think about my health? And so I have found it to be a massive time saver on the health side. Another thing we walk through in the book is just using artificial intelligence to look at your schedule.
And it’s very good if you give it access to your Google calendar to figure out where you’re spending most of your time and suggesting things that you could stop doing. It’s unemotional. It’s not there to judge you. It’s there to kind of just look at the data and it often does flag things that don’t need to be done. I think if you can really work with it, it can also save you time in putting together things. I used to spend a lot of time, I spent a lot of time just dreaming up new ideas and then I’d be in all kinds of conversations about what might this look like. I’ve figured out how to use artificial intelligence quite well to do mock-ups of new business ideas and it doesn’t require anyone else. And little by little, the artificial intelligence understands my design sensibilities and I can in two minutes do what it would’ve taken me two months to do.
But I do think you kind of have to organize your mind before you use AI. Otherwise, if you’re a disorganized mind and you’re kind of cluttered and then you jump into it and you’ve not really thought about, okay, how might this be a force multiplier for good instead of a slop creator, I worry you’re going to end up just creating more slop. That’s why I just think whether people buy the book, don’t buy the book, read the book, don’t read the book, I do think if there’s a takeaway would be just take time today to think about the work and life thing. What do you want out of both? Give yourself kind of this guide that will help you make some of these decisions, whether it’s using artificial intelligence or not so that you have more direction. Don’t be the bobber in the lake, have an anchor.
Brett McKay:
Well, Jim, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Jim VandeHei:
Yeah, if you go to axios.com, hopefully people are familiar with us, you can get it there. If you Google simplify the book, you’ll be able to find it. I write a column. If you happen to be a CEO, I write a weekly newsletter to CEOs. If you email me at jim@axios, I’ll sign you up. I write a lot about AI, politics, other topics, and it’s fun. So I appreciate you. I appreciate your podcast and I appreciate your time.
Brett McKay:
Likewise, it’s been a pleasure. My guest here is Jim VandeHei. He’s the author of the book, Simplify. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
