In my last post, I wrote about Smart Brevity, a book I read on a flight last year. While I was looking it up, I found out the same three authors, the founders of Axios, released another book last month called Simplify.
I dove into it over the weekend. It didn’t disappoint.
Smart Brevity was about words. Simplify is about everything else we do. It covers meetings, reports, calendars, inboxes, commitments, and even the stuff piling up in your closet.
The authors build the whole book on three rules.
Confront everything you do and ask why.
Delete what doesn’t earn its place.
Amplify what’s left.
That framework is useful on its own, but the authors make a claim that I completely agree with. In an odd way, AI isn’t simplifying our lives. It’s mass-producing more options, more content, more decisions, and way more noise.
An economist saw this coming in 1865
The authors point to an old idea called Jevons Paradox.
William Stanley Jevons was a British economist who noticed something strange about coal. As steam engines became more efficient, England didn’t burn less coal. It actually burned more. When something gets cheaper to use, we find more ways to use it.
The authors argue AI is proving the same law today. When something becomes easy to produce, we don’t produce less of it. We produce more. Way more.
A first draft used to cost an afternoon. Now it costs a sentence. So we produce more drafts, more decks, more summaries, and more updates.
Last week I wrote about the emails in my inbox getting longer. That’s Jevons Paradox connected to a send button.
Slop is motion without value
The book has a name for what all this extra production creates. They call it slop. We’ve all experienced this. It comes in the form of tasks, commitments, or things that create motion without creating value for anyone.
Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield told the authors that in big organizations, some people work a forty-hour week while “using up 400 hours of other people’s time.” Ouch!
That’s what makes slop dangerous. It doesn’t stay with the person who made it.
Every unnecessary report needs a reader. Every ten paragraph email that could have been two sentences, needs a reply. Every extra meeting adds more time to a calendar slot, an agenda, and a follow-up. One person’s slop becomes everyone else’s work.
AI didn’t invent slop. It just removed the friction that used to slow it down.
My favorite simplification tool is the unsubscribe link
I have a habit that sounds too small to write about. Periodically, I go through my email and unsubscribe from most of my subscriptions.
Every time I do it, I’m amazed at how many things I’ve been resubscribed to.
Each email seems small on its own. A few seconds to scan, a few more to delete. Together, each new junk mail buries the real messages that actually need me.
The book calls out this exact thing. The subscription you forgot to cancel doesn’t feel like a burden. It just sits quietly in your life, generating small decisions and draining a little attention every day.
Unsubscribing isn’t glamorous, and it doesn’t require AI. It’s just Confront and Delete applied to an inbox.
Organizations work the same way. Nobody sets out to build a bloated organization. We just keep subscribing. A report someone requested once. A recurring meeting for a project that wrapped up long ago. A new approval step added after one bad incident.
Each one made sense when it started. Very few ever get cancelled. Bloat begets bloat. Suddenly, you can do more, so you do.
Use AI to need less, not to make more
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t an argument against AI. I spend most of my working time helping people use it well.
The book isn’t against AI either. The authors cite a Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group study where consultants using AI finished more tasks, worked about 25 percent faster, and produced work roughly 40 percent higher in quality. Their point is that the gains came from discipline, not volume.
Their rule is simple. Don’t use AI to add to the pile. Use it to subtract from it. Every time you open an AI tool, ask whether you’re using it to create more or to need less.
Instead of asking for a longer report, ask which of your recurring reports nobody would notice missing after thirty days. Instead of asking for five versions of an email, ask whether the email needs to exist at all. Instead of asking AI to help you fit more into your calendar, paste in your recurring meetings and ask which ones could be shortened, replaced, or dropped.
The authors even suggest building a “Why Bot,” an assistant whose only job is to ask why every time you add a new commitment, and what happens if you don’t.
AI can write a polite no in seconds. It still can’t make you hit send. That part is on us. You have to choose to stop.
The many things crowd out the one thing
Faith work is especially vulnerable to slop, because so much of what we add feels faithful.
Another meeting feels like care. Another report feels like accountability. Another update feels like communication. It’s hard to delete something that feels like it serves God.
Jesus said something to a very busy friend that I thought about while reading the book.
Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her. (Luke 10:41-42)
Martha wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was serving. But the many things crowded out the one thing.
Slop in our work rarely looks like neglect. It looks like faithful busyness. Slowly it eats the time and attention we need for the people and the work that matter most.
That’s the real reason to simplify. Less is just the means. The point is clearing room for the one thing that’s needful.
If you want to go further with the book, I put together chapter-by-chapter notes on Simplify in my Innovation Library. Each chapter has key takeaways, a faith-based application, and questions for leaders.
What are you still subscribed to, in your inbox or your organization, that you’d never sign up for today? When you unsubscribe from those things, considering subscribing to my Substack ;)