Kelly talks to Roy Schwartz, co-founder and CEO at Axios HQ, the world’s first AI-powered internal communications management platform. He’s also the co-founder of Axios, the award-winning news organization. He is the co-author of “Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less” and he has a new book he has co-authored called “Simplify: Do 50 Percent More with 50 Percent Less.” 

I read your last book as well your new one, and it made me think of the improv exercise we teach called “60, 30, 10.” It’s where we have someone tell an accomplishment they had in 60 seconds, then 30 seconds and then 10 seconds. In the exercise they practice the ability to hone their message. 

“I love that. As we discovered in our first book, Smart Brevity, there’s so many ways to make things much more engaging, much more efficient. We have worked with a thousand different companies and applied smart brevity to everything from oil safety rig information to deep scientific research related to healthcare, and it really works in all instances. And I think sometimes people worry about the word ‘brevity,’ but we picked that specifically. It wasn’t brief, right? Brief just means like we’re going to just shorten something. Brevity means you’re doing the exercise you’re talking about, which is getting to the essence of the most important point and conveying it in the most efficient way. And that’s actually what your exercise does, right?” 

So, we’re now legally required to talk about AI. How can you use that tool to Simplify? 

“So, for me, I’ve connected it to my email; I’ve connected it to my calendar. I actually ask it to review where I am spending my time. I actually put in the prompt here are the goals I’m trying to achieve this week: take a look at my calendar, take a look at my emails; at the end of the week, tell me how efficient I was against the goals that I’ve set, right? I will say it’s eye-opening because you end up spending, you know, 50% of your time on things unrelated to the goals that you’d set yourself. And if you can remove those, or if you can automate those, then you make time for creativity, which is the place where humans are going to make the biggest impact.” 

I was working remotely last week in Michigan, and I finished reading your book when I saw a meeting on my calendar that didn’t fit your criteria for having a meeting. I suggested we turn that meeting to an email, and everyone was perfectly fine with that.

“One of the things we did, we went a little extreme with this when we started to see success, we call it meeting bankruptcy. So basically, it’s like, hey, we have meeting bankruptcy, cancel all meetings, right? And only add them back as you require them. And then we gave criteria. And to your point, we said, could this be an email? What is the smallest number of people that need to be at that meeting if we’re going to have a meeting? What’s the tight agenda that we’re trying to do? And every meeting should at least have some type of decision that comes out of it. And so, when you start putting in criteria about what meetings must have, everyone can just declare a meeting bankruptcy, and remove all the meetings. But I love your point, which is that everyone can suggest: ‘Hey, I think we can cancel this meeting because XYZ, right?’ And I do think that people will be thankful to get some time back and to get tighter, more efficient meetings.”