What if the secret to getting more done isn’t doing more, but getting ruthless about what you stop doing?
My guest today, Mike Allen, has a pretty simple test for figuring out what stays and what goes. In fact, you just heard it: “Hell yeah.”
If someone asks you to take on the project, go to the thing, have the meeting, make the commitment, and your reaction is anything less than hell yeah? Mike says that might be your answer right there.
And listen, as someone who has spent a lot of her career saying yes, building, adding, producing, optimizing, I needed this conversation.
Mike Allen is the co-founder of Axios and previously co-founded Politico. He’s also the longtime journalist behind the daily Axios AM and Axios PM newsletters. His new book, Simplify: Do 50 Percent More with 50 Percent Less, co-authored with Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei and Roy Schwartz, is essentially an argument against what they call toxic complexity.
Because here’s the irony: AI was supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, we have more content, more choices, more decks, more emails, more things we could be doing. And Mike’s argument is that unless we get intentional about what deserves our attention, technology is just going to help us create more noise, faster.
Their framework is three steps: Confront what you’re doing. Delete what doesn’t matter. Amplify what does.
We talk about why complexity can actually feel comforting, how to declare “meeting bankruptcy,” what a simplified financial life might look like, and why figuring out what is enough may be one of the most important things you can do with your money and your time.
And I end up applying Mike’s advice to my own business in real time, including some changes I’m making to So Money in 2027.
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