Two years after their book Smart Brevity became a popular, if controversial, manual for streamlining communication, the trio that founded Axios is back with another playbook to simplify life on the job or at home. The new one by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz is fittingly titled Simplify. And if you overlook its horribly hedge-fund-sounding subtitle — Do 50% More with 50% Less — the book really does offer some useful advice.
The authors’ overall message is that the world is growing ever more complex and confusing, and artificial intelligence is just making it worse. “AI isn’t simplifying your life,” they write. “It’s mass-producing more options, more content, more decisions, more noise.” But fear not. There’s an easier and saner way to live and work, and it requires embracing what they call “radical simplicity — knowing what to ignore, what to delete, what to say no to, and what to build (your) days around.”
I’m usually not a fan of self-help books, except maybe in January, when the New Year’s resolution atmosphere is hard to avoid. The time management genre can be especially frustrating, rife as it is with vague maxims and no-duh recommendations. But Simplify recognizes the uber-busyness of modern life and offers three steps to help readers drill down and make a difference, one challenge at a time: Confront, delete, and amplify. Rather than deciding whether to delegate a task, for instance, you need to ask: Why am I doing this at all? The authors go well beyond, “This meeting could have been an email,” and suggest maybe ditching the email as well. By confronting the dumb, wasteful things we do every day, they argue, we can make room for the meaningful stuff.
Listening to this audiobook on my way to and from work, I gleaned several tips not only for managing time, but for altering my overall mindset and personal priorities. “The first step in simplifying isn’t changing your tools or your schedule. It’s changing your relationship with complexity itself,” the authors write. “You have to stop seeing it as inevitable and start seeing it as a choice.”
The print version of the book is presented in classic Axios style, with short chapters, direct headlines, and information in bite-sized chunks — you might call it form following function. And while most of the advice is not exactly groundbreaking, it’s certainly empowering and reaffirming for anyone who struggles with the relentless complexity of work and life. And isn’t that everyone?
