This 3-step method to simplify your life starts with your obituary

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz want you to think deeply about death.

Not in a morbid sense, mind you. Rather, imagine you’re writing your own obituary. What do you want it to say?

“Thinking about it that way and then working backwards really does create a map [for how to spend your time],” VandeHei told Big Think.

VandeHei would like his obituary to say that he was a great father, son, sibling, and husband who was passionate about the work that he did and generous in the workplace. The task before him now is to make all those descriptors ring true by the end.

He thinks the best way for each of us to be remembered fondly in death is to first simplify our lives. Cut out the extraneous to maximize the meaningful. He, Allen, and Schwartz wrote a pithy manual, appropriately titled Simplify, to help readers do just that.

“Simplicity isn’t really about productivity,” they write. “It’s about clarity. It’s about freedom. It’s about spending your finite days on Earth doing things that matter, with people you love, in ways that feel true to who you are.”

A worthy idea

VandeHei, Allen, and Schwartz — hardened journalists with noses for sniffing out BS and a penchant for digging up the real story — cofounded Axios, from the Greek word for “worthy,” a decade ago and, in a brutal, bleak media environment, turned it into a resounding success. If you’re unfamiliar with the website, Axios delivers information on the news that matters, from politics to business, in a concise, to-the-point writing style that informs readers quickly.

The success of Axios’ journalism set the stage for Axios HQ, a software company that helps businesses streamline their internal communications, and the best-selling book Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less.

It was a book that VandeHei was initially hesitant to write when he was propositioned to do so.

“Most books should be a magazine article,” he told Big Think.

And yet, with Simplify, he’s proven himself a hypocrite once again!

Your simplifying power tools

Cheeky chiding aside, VandeHei said he is “not anti-book.” Moreover, Simplify actually isn’t much longer than a feature you might read in The New Yorker, amounting to just 200 or so pages of writing in a big, eye-friendly font with short chapters and ample spacing. That’s by design. VandeHei and his co-authors didn’t want to waste their readers’ precious time.

“It should be as long as it needs to be,” he said. “You want to make it really useful to people.”

Simplify’s length is also in-keeping with its title and with the three signature “power tools” of simplicity that VandeHei, Allen, and Schwartz seek to impart to readers: confront, delete, amplify. As they summarized in the book:

• Confront. We do an astonishing amount out of habit or blind agreement. Stop. Reflect. Why am I doing this? Will it matter even if I do it well? These two questions will erase years of wasted energy.
• Delete. Your two most powerful words and weapons: no and delete. Ruthlessly search for things to erase, big and small. Less is more. You’re hunting for things to kill.
• Amplify. Once you delete stuff, you have more time for meaningful, fun, and invigorating activities.

Confront

Confronting can be as basic as taking 20 minutes to assess the things that you do on a daily basis and truly interrogating whether they are necessary or make you happy. This can be done with your habits at home or your work routine.

Two-and-a-half years ago, VandeHei encouraged all of his employees at Axios to confront their jobs. He asked them to write down the three things they do that have the biggest impact on the company and the three things they think are a waste of time. VandeHei utilized the lessons of this blunt inventory to reinvigorate Axios.

“We have fewer people doing fewer things, getting exponentially better results,” he told Big Think. “People are happier and more focused than ever. We’re producing 75% more revenue per employee, and people just like working here. They’re doing the things that they want to do, that they’re uniquely good at.”

One thing VandeHei thinks that everyone needs to confront at this unique moment is their use of artificial intelligence. He recognizes AI as a double-edged sword, both a revolutionary tool for productivity, but also the “greatest complexity machine known to man.” It generates more of everything: information, often right, sometimes glaringly wrong; content, from books and memes to videos and images; and work, presentations, mockups, and emails that often beget more pointless work.

“Maybe 2% of people are truly finding great success with [artificial intelligence],” he said. “They are people who’ve thought through what to focus on, what to outsource, and how to smartly use the technology to create more positive work, but not create more work.”

Delete

The word no often has a negative connotation in society. It’s associated with avoiding new experiences, shirking responsibility, and generally being a “Negative Nancy.”

Despite no’s poor press, VandeHei is a fan. He says it’s the most efficient way to delete complexity, distractions, and decisions in one’s life, leaving more time for the activities we enjoy and the people we truly love.

Say “no” to clutter and get rid of the things you don’t use and the clothes you don’t wear. Say “no” to the parties and work events you really don’t care about and spend time with your close friends and family instead. Just say “no” to all the things you’ve been reluctantly saying “yes” to.

No is easy to use in one’s personal life, of course, but what about at work? VandeHei actually likes it when employees say “no,” provided they present a good reason. It means that Axios can delete things that are unnecessary and wasteful. One of those things is meetings.

“There’s a whole profession where people are paid to be in meetings but never understand why they are in meetings,” VandeHei bluntly said.

In his opinion, meetings should not be updates, which is what they are all too often used for. Updates should be in writing, and be as brief as possible. A meeting should only be called when a decision needs to be made, it should include the fewest participants possible, and it should last only as long as it needs to.

VandeHei and his co-authors actually deputize readers of Simplify to end the tyranny of meetings.

“If you attend a meeting that wastes your time and others’, share that observation constructively with the organizer,” they write.

Amplify

Once the uncomfortable work of confronting and deleting is done, the fun begins! You can fill your time with the activities and people that animate you. VandeHei amplifies sleep, exercise, family, and faith, among other things.

When discussing Simplify and thinking about the liberated life that the “power tools” can help construct, Vandeihei was positively giddy. “Like a kid,” he admitted.

“I’ve put it into action. I’ve seen the pain points. I’ve seen what works. I’ve seen the difference it makes for the individual.”

This, he says, is what separates Simplify from other self-help books, a category he typically cringes at.

Most self-help books are too academic and detached from reality, he said.

“This, we’ve lived.”

This article is featured on Big Think.