There is a familiar boss battle in modern work and home life: the player versus the endless side quests. Every message looks urgent, every meeting claims it needs to exist, and every tiny choice can nibble away at the attention needed for something that actually matters. Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz, the co-founders of Axios, have built a new book around confronting that problem with an increasingly unavoidable tool: artificial intelligence.
Simplify, released Tuesday, presents AI not as a magic wand that completes life on behalf of the user, but as a practical assistant for cutting clutter, questioning needless routines and creating room for meaningful work. The book extends ideas associated with the group’s “Smart Brevity” approach, while making a broader case that reducing avoidable complexity can help people handle the complexity that cannot be removed.
For a gaming-minded reader, the core appeal is easy to recognize. A well-designed game does not bury its best mechanics beneath dozens of pointless menus. It teaches players what matters, removes unnecessary friction and leaves enough mental bandwidth for the hard decisions. Simplify applies a similar instinct to calendars, communication, work processes and personal habits.
Three steps: confront, delete, amplify
The authors organize the book’s approach around three actions: confront challenges directly, delete distractions and then amplify the work and experiences that deserve more attention. It is intentionally more demanding than simply asking an AI chatbot to produce a tidier to-do list. The underlying task is deciding what should not be there in the first place.
VandeHei and Allen offer personal examples of using boundaries to protect time. Each sets aside a daily hour for the gym and turns down many social commitments deemed nonessential. Those choices are not presented as universal rules or a demand that everyone live with identical priorities. Rather, they are examples of assigning a real cost to time that is often treated as endlessly available.
Allen’s professional example is similarly rooted in revision. He had to move away from longer writing habits developed while leading Politico’s Playbook newsletter in order to work within the more concise style of Axios AM. Schwartz, who leads the business-focused Axios HQ operation, describes reframing dyslexia from an obstacle into an asset for reducing dense material into understandable points.
The book also includes Rachel Maddow’s explanation for using a consistent all-black on-air wardrobe: removing even a minuscule daily decision about clothing. That detail may seem small, but it illustrates the authors’ larger claim. A person does not have to optimize every part of existence. They can choose a few repeatable systems that prevent trivial decisions from consuming disproportionate energy.
AI as a filter, not a replacement brain
AI is central to Simplify, though the authors’ framing comes with a significant caveat: people remain responsible for the choices, judgment and boundaries involved. The technology can help evaluate a packed calendar, ask whether a task is necessary, summarize research or create a structure for following through on an objective. It cannot decide what a fulfilling life or worthwhile career looks like for an individual.
Related coverage includes Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz Turn to AI With ‘Simplify’.
That distinction is important amid a technology conversation that regularly swings between hype and dread. AI can accelerate an existing process, but speed alone does not prove the process deserves to survive. An automated meeting summary is useful if the meeting was needed. If it was not, a very efficient summary just helps preserve an inefficient ritual.
The authors warn about “slop,” a term covering low-value material produced by people as well as AI. The concern is not limited to bad prose or dubious images. Slop can also be a chain of unnecessary requests: one person produces a document that nobody needs, prompting another person to spend time responding to it, which produces another task for someone else. AI can multiply that loop if used carelessly. It can also interrupt it by asking a blunt but valuable question: does this need to be done?
That question is a useful guardrail for people tempted to use generative tools merely to produce more. More drafts, more slides, more messages and more planning documents can feel productive while obscuring the actual goal. In gaming terms, it is the difference between collecting every map icon and advancing the quest that brought you into the world.
Where the book sees practical value
Schwartz’s business work supplies one clear application: using AI alongside concise communication methods to turn lengthy healthcare research into accessible bullet points. The purpose is not to erase the underlying research or pretend that a summary is the same thing as expertise. It is to get relevant information to people faster, in a form that can be understood and acted upon.
That philosophy should resonate with anyone handling game-industry news, collecting data, patch notes, auction listings or sprawling community guides. Summarization can help establish the lay of the land. It should not end the investigation when accuracy, context or a meaningful purchase is on the line. For broader coverage of how AI is becoming part of consumer technology, see our report on Siri AI’s expansion to additional languages.
The book reportedly closes with a QR code intended to help readers use an AI agent as an accountability partner for the “Simplify” method. That is an intriguing twist on the standard self-help workbook. The authors acknowledge that people often understand an approach in theory but fail to sustain it in practice. An AI agent, unlike a friend, colleague or coach, is not emotionally invested in accepting an excuse. But its lack of feelings is not automatically a virtue. It makes the tool potentially useful for consistent reminders and prompts, while also reinforcing why users must set humane, realistic goals.
Efficiency has limits, and the authors say so
One of the more grounded elements of the premise is the acknowledgment that not everything should be simplified. Some parts of life are inherently difficult, deeply personal or demanding of prolonged attention. Grief, family obligations, care work, creative development, health challenges and major professional decisions are not calendar clutter waiting to be deleted.
VandeHei’s position is that trimming the avoidable material creates capacity for those unavoidable realities. Fewer hollow meetings, less duplicated work and fewer low-priority projects can provide more time to think carefully when depth is required. That is a more credible ambition than promising that AI can make life frictionless.
There is also a useful warning here for players and collectors. A hobby can be a refuge from optimization culture, and it should not be reduced entirely to a spreadsheet. Cataloging a collection may be helpful; it is not necessarily more important than playing a game, enjoying a display or talking with friends about why a particular cartridge, controller or card matters. Tools should make space for joy rather than turn joy into another efficiency metric.
What ‘Simplify’ is really asking readers to do
Allen, VandeHei and Schwartz are not positioning AI as the protagonist of this system. The person using it remains the decision-maker. That means understanding a tool’s benefits, staying alert to its persuasive pull and recognizing the risks of outsourcing thinking that should remain human.
For readers already overwhelmed by AI advice, that may be the book’s most useful point. The first move is not necessarily to adopt every new agent, plug-in or assistant. It is to identify the repetitive work, the noisy information streams and the commitments that are not earning their place. Only then can AI be asked to help—whether by condensing documents, organizing options, maintaining a routine or challenging an assumption.
Simplification, in this framing, is not about making everything shallow. It is about protecting the time and attention needed for the things that deserve depth. That is a modest promise compared with the loudest AI marketing, but it may be the one most worth testing.
