The 3-Step System for Simplifying Your Work and Life

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1:27Visit artofmanliness.com-slaj-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 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. 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 in fulfilling. Even when we add as 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 the fight this drift for 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 Van Dehae and he's the co-founder and CEO of Axios and the co-author of Simplify. Stay 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

2:28inundated 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 shows over, check out our show notes at aowim.is slash simplify. All right, Jim Van Dehae, 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? 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

3:30the 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. How are you seeing AI increase the amount of complexity in our lives? Because the idea of the selling point is AI is supposed to simplify our lives. 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 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

4:32is 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 CRE AI. 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. 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

5:38somebody I think we talked about this a couple years ago. I have no sort of egotistical scratch to it in terms of writing books. I've reached the point in life from 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. 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 this simplify

6:41mentality. 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 a 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

7:44you do that you think are dumb or that shouldn't be done in order. One, two, three. And then the three things you think can 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 sores, but it's not just productivity because who really gives it that's kind of the business advantage. Your personal satisfaction sores 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 like twice as much with half the work is so important at this very specific moment because I just can't envision a time

8:47in 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. Yeah, I want to get more into the framework because you have some great examples from it and some brass tacked things. But just sticking on this idea of complexity, even before AI, things had a tendency to get complex. Like why, 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? 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 worst it functions. The

9:50reason 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 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 simplifying. Some way simplify is smart brevity on steroids applied to every aspect of your life. If you can tell you the 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.

10:52But everyone always just wanted to add something. We don't default to subtract, we always default to add. Yeah, 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 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 Rang, 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. It seems small, but I do a version of this with I really, there's only one brand, a shirt,

11:52I have one brand, a gene. 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 400 beers, I just lock up. There's too many decisions, there's too many choices. 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, freeze up time to do stuff that's actually rewarding and brings us benefit. And ultimately, that's what all of us want. 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? 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 it means is just like

12:53stuff 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 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 human like activity. Like 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 sets 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 word. That's one thing. But the other slop that I think is even more insidious is just like the work slop that gets piled up out of bad habit in inertia. Habit in inertia. Those things are so powerful. Like even at my company run by me who's obsessed with this, if I'm not doing like a monthly or even more frequent kind of inventory about what are people doing and why are you doing it,

13:54we revert to habit. We revert to inertia. The number of times that people say, well, I do this because like 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 this stuff you want to do at work and do the stuff you want to do outside of work. Yeah. So meetings can be sloped. Reports can be sloped. You have this great example from AT&T where this guy comes in as CEO and you realize that there were thousands of company policy 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's 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,

14:57even if it wasn't useful anymore. Yeah. The guy's name is John Stanky, CEO of AT&T, one of the oldest companies, Bob L. In the US, a workforce that's well over 100,000 people. And he came in and he's become a simplified zealot. And he realized they have 8,000, 8,000 different policy declarations that are like 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 Stanky calls it is, quote, unquote, 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 Stanky's admitting is kind of what I'm admitting or what Mark Zuckerberg admitted. Like,

16:01they basically went through this, they called it the year of efficiency. But when we talked to him, talk 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 realization 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. Yeah. And in your personal life, SlopP 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 gotta get rid of this or just stuff you do with your family. A lot of families feel really rushed and harried. And then ever take a look at their calendar to ask, why are we doing this thing? Do we really need to do this activity? Probably not. Yeah. And I think like in the book, like I talk a little bit about this, I do it and I'd

17:01recommend anyone else to do this. Nobody ever even steps back to this. I'm going to take 20 minutes today. And I'm going to think, what do I actually even want out of life? Like when I'm on my deathbed, like, what do I want to be able to say I accomplished or I achieved or I became? And write it down. Like, 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 walk through how you could do this with your diet, how you could do it with your, your wardrobe. But I do think it just is mentality of taking the time of like, 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 their ways that I could just automate this. So I'm not having to spend any time thinking about this serial versus that serial. Like, there's technology that does this for free. All of us have access to

18:05it 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. Let's talk about this process kind of drilled 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? Because like's busy, like we're all busy, like the average person's getting, I think of what is

19:07150 emails a day, 130 texts a day. That doesn't even account for your Tinder alerts and all the other people like calling you and wanting your time. So I don't think most people reckon with how much our brain is getting counted with incoming stuff all day, every day, which gives us less time to spend any time reflecting on like, okay, like 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. Like what? Just, just, just, what is it that I'm doing? And is this actually the thing I should be doing? Like just doing that has a radical shift, right? I always look back and we wrote smart brevity, like one of the big aha moments and the thing that really seem to resonate with readers and then people when I did a speaking tour on this is no one even stopped

20:09to 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 like 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

21:16time 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. So with this confront, I mean, this is something I think would be useful maybe to 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's not like too like you 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? 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. Like just thinking, again, like 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?

22:21Could that meeting be a phone call? Could that meeting be an email? Like 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. Like what would 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. Like this all flowed from like I do take it further, right? 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 like am I spending enough time on the things that matter most. And that always is helped me reset to make sure that I am doing that. Like a good example is like I made the decision years ago that like I think the one of the most important things to me is not to actually have a wide circle of friends. Like I

23:24want to have deep, deep relationships in 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. In 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 in 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. I've done that in my own life. Mine was early on in my

24:26career. I would do speaking engagements where I have to travel. At first, it's always great to get invited to speak. 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. For me to go to some place like Washington, it's basically three days because one day's for traveling there, then one day's the event, and then the next day's the travel back. 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. I don't do speaking anymore. But that's a great example. 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. 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 a time to, 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

25:27then spend that time doing the stuff that I want to do. I just think most people are like a piece of wood floating along the river and going where the current takes it. Because there's just too much going on. We don't have time to evaluate. Like if there's one big takeaway from this book is like, 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. We're going to say a quick break for you, words more sponsors. I've been using the great from Caldera Lab every day for a year now and it's made a big difference with my skin. My skin looks better than it did before I started. It's smoother, firmer and less tired looking. And this isn't just me squinting at the mirror and seeing what I want to see. Kate, my wife has noticed too. And she's not one to hand out unearned compliments. The great is an anti-aging serum design specifically for men's skin, which is 25% thicker and oilier than women's and ages differently. So it needs formulas built for it. It helps reduce

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30:41or use the delete key on? I mean, I'm pretty ruthless about my schedule. Like I, and again, like it's small things and you could say Jimmy or the CEO so you get to do it you want. But I think most people can do this like a couple things like one, I'll almost never take a 30 minute meeting at most. I'll say 15 unless there's like 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 and we're not going to do updates, I'm not going to hear about your weekend, we just we've got to do business and so we can 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 in 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

31:44not something that's, you know, family related, if it's not something that is keeping me in like 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 like as someone who in the sounds boastful and I'm not and I know I have some level privilege because you're a CEO, but like I run a company, I'm writing a column, I write books and I still do some speaking, but I still find in our 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 lived the life I wanted to live. As a rubric

32:45and deciding whether you should say yes or notice something like an invitation to do it 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 suggest is something called the handcuffs tactic. What's that? I mean, what I've realized in running companies like so much of it is like 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

33:45or force them to think about why are they doing the things that they do. A great example of this was like just one of the origins of smart brevity was I thought 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? It's so 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. You have to have these little handcuffs thing like one for me for diet. It took me a long time to figure out what should I be eating and drinking that makes me healthy. But my handcuffs are very much limited the types of food that I eat.

34:47So 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 just makes it easier and makes sure I'm kind of eating what I know I need to eat. It eliminates the amount of like stress of deciding what I'm going to have that night. Those things start to add up little by little, those handcuffs. Yeah, I eat the same thing every day too. It hasn't changed in 10 years. My dad was the same way too. Every morning it was it was special K and coffee. That was it and he still does it. I don't have it. Let's start by this amplifies. This is all about what after you've deleted all the the slop from your work of 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? 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

35:50corporate 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. A lot of the delete and know is to put the emphasis on the things you're actually good at. 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 work 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 it'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

36:58from doing that because it's not just that you end up doing better work and your company benefits is you psychologically light up. You're doing the things that you know you want to do. You know that you're 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. 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. You 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. Yeah, analogy that I like is it's like a garden instead of spending your time pulling weeds, it's been more time planning flowers because it looks nice, but also there's no room for weeds to grow. I love that. Yeah, it's very true. But again, like to do that, you have to, it is about the thought.

38:00It 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 like a real system and real time to apply it. That's why I end, we end every chapter with very specific questions to ask yourself or very specific tasks that you could do. Like even this exercise in the work section, this idea of just take 10 minutes today and like, 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, they're waking time, like working, going to work, bitching about work, thinking about work, 75% of your time. Have you ever thought for 20 minutes, like, what do I want to get out of that? Like, what would make me feel like I really, really had achievement? And if 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 like I need to be doing now or doing in the

39:04year 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 I just like having these written nor stars, or don't know if you've written, maybe just remember it as a writer, I tend to write everything, but just having that frame of like, where do I want to go? What do I want to accomplish? What can I stop doing? Is such a beautiful, liberating exercise? 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 I think, well, I got to go to some workshop or take some course. And he's like, no, just make a list of three things you want to accomplish with your career in the next 10 years. For sure. I mean, you get an example, when we left Politico to start axiots, like I obviously been doing this exercise in the back of my head. And one of the things I sort

40:09of reached a point in my life, I was like, okay, I've had success. Like, what do I want? Well, one of the most important things to me was I just want to do like really interesting things with people I genuinely enjoy. And that, okay, well, 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 like the type of people will hire and fire. Like we had 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 just, I get really drained and down by people who do the wrong thing for the wrong reason, even if they're super talented. Like 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 that your average person would be able to do. But we all have that.

41:11And I think you just need that nor star. You have to have that in your mind or you're going to drift. 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? 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 are best at and bring the most value. And then the three, like 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 like, 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

42:15finding 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. 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? That little exercise in 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. 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.

43:17Because 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? 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? 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, as long as it's meandering because people didn't think about, what is it we're trying to achieve? Why does it matter? What's the next step? Most communication should be 100 words, not a thousand words. Most things can be solved very quickly. 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

44:21that 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, I want to open Jim's email. He's 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. 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. 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,

45:25how do you defeat bad corporate and personal habit? You've got to have a system. Let's think of this as a 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? Yeah, it goes to that idea we talked about a little bit earlier about just 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. I've got this thing called anglosing spondylitis. Over time, my spine will want to harden into one bone and it could make things difficult. 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? That means I probably need to carve out an hour a day to work out and make sure I maintain my flexibility.

46:26It 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 get less pain. That then says, okay, if I need to do that, I've really simplified it like we talked about with the diet. How do I make sure that I can adhere to that each and every day? Again, you could say like 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 on a habit. Those other things flow from having kind of that nor star. And I think

47:27you have to have a nor 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 at 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-adulgent gospel. It's much more about how do you just live like a really good productive satisfactory joyful life. And I think you've got to have that system. You've got to have those stars. 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 you've been doing it at work and in your life? 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 only a couple of things where I found it to be quite helpful is like I put

48:32all of my health information into chat GPT. You know, 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 like 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 and putting together things, right? Like 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

49:33what might this look like. I figured out how to use artificial intelligence quite well to do mock up some new business ideas and that 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 have 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. Like I do think if there's a takeaway, it 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.

50:34Don't be the barber in the lake. Have an anchor. Well, Jim, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? 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 at 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. Likewise, it's been a pleasure. My guest here is Jim Van Dehaay. He's the author of the book Simplify. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at awin.is slash simplify. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the Awin podcast. If you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on the podcast player that used to listen to the show. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider

51:35sharing the show with a friend or family member who thinks you're something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support until next time. It's Brett McKay. Reminds on the same one podcast, but put what you've heard into action.