Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz, the founders behind Axios and its Smart Brevity format, have a new book called Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less, and its central argument runs against the popular narrative around artificial intelligence. AI has not lightened anyone's workload, they argue, it has multiplied it, filling organizations with more presentations, longer emails, and what they call work like activity, motion that looks like progress without producing any.
The false productivity trap
VandeHei describes what he hears from corporate leaders bluntly, saying when I talk to people at corporations, they're like, my team is drowning. Allen points to a simpler root cause, noting that everybody's more verbose and that people naturally tend to complexify things without a deliberate effort to stop it. Together they call this the false productivity trap, a state where busyness gets mistaken for actual accomplishment.
A framework built on three questions
Their proposed fix is a recurring audit, done monthly or even weekly, built around three questions, what work genuinely requires your attention, what can be eliminated entirely, and what can be automated. They lean on research suggesting people control only about one sixth of their own lives once sleep, work, and constant cognitive distraction are subtracted out, a number meant to make the case that simplification is not optional, it is survival.
The two word answer Allen swears by
Allen's practical advice is disarmingly simple, adopt the phrase I'm booked instead of constructing an elaborate excuse every time you need to decline something. His test for whether to say yes is just as direct, if your gut reaction to an invitation is a lukewarm I probably should, that is already a no. He notes that genuinely successful people rarely take on obligations outside family and work, and echoes Oprah Winfrey's line that no is a complete sentence.
Permission by design, not by default
Schwartz focuses on a different lever, arguing that written goals give people explicit psychological permission to turn down commitments that do not align with them. In his view, a lot of organizational paralysis comes down to employees never being told outright that they are allowed to say no to recurring obligations. His framing is that everything in an organization tends to get done by default, when it should instead be done by design.
Where Smart Brevity actually came from
The philosophy did not appear out of nowhere. VandeHei and Allen spent nearly thirty years as White House reporters before co-founding Politico, where Allen's Playbook newsletter became the thing White House staff reportedly read first every morning, establishing the credibility behind the brevity format long before Axios existed. They launched Axios in 2016 building directly on that instinct, and Axios HQ, the AI powered internal communications spinoff Schwartz now runs, has reached profitability at around 20 million dollars in annualized revenue, evidence that the simplify philosophy scales into an actual business, not just a writing style.
Why they say this isn't just nostalgia
The founders are careful to frame their argument as something more than longing for a simpler past. VandeHei points to the 1990s specifically, describing a period that was authentically pre-internet, pre-text, pre-email, pre-Tinder, when people simply had fewer alerts competing for their attention. The cost of today's constant alerts, in their telling, goes beyond mere distraction, it actively erodes the amount of focus left over for work that actually matters.
Different AI advice depending on where you are
Their guidance on AI changes depending on career stage. For college students, VandeHei recommends minimal reliance on AI, prioritizing brain development and building real domain knowledge, since in his view most good ideas flow from fact pattern recognition that AI cannot substitute for. For established professionals, he argues AI can be used for efficiency and deeper thinking at the same time, saying he feels smarter and a little bit deeper today than I was two or three years ago. For people just entering the workforce, the advice shifts toward speed and specificity, identify the five ways top performers in your specific role actually use AI, and learn from free YouTube videos, podcasts, and newsletters rather than waiting on formal training. Allen adds a companion habit, defining weekly, monthly, and yearly priorities that dictate both your calendar and what work actually gets done.
The Gen Z tell
VandeHei shared one observation that stuck with him, watching his sons and their friends become de facto AI consultants during summer internships simply by being comfortable experimenting with the tools, while more senior colleagues hesitated. Despite being the most junior people in the room, they ended up treated as internal consultants on AI adoption, a small but telling example of how comfort with a new tool can outweigh seniority almost overnight.
The real point underneath all of it
For anyone doing marketing, editorial, or brand communication work, the throughline in Simplify is not really about AI at all. It is that simplicity is a discipline that has to be chosen again and again, and every new tool that promises to save time will quietly hand that time right back unless someone is actively willing to cut, delegate, or just say no.
