The Principles
The Elimination Project runs on ideas from the founders of Axios. Simplify tells us how to decide what to stop. Smart Brevity tells us how to say so, clearly enough that people act on it. Both have chapter-by-chapter deep dives in the Innovation Library.
Simplify in the Library Smart Brevity in the LibraryFrom Simplify
Complexity is the default. Every report, meeting, and approval arrived with a good reason, and almost none of them ever leave. Simplify gives three tools for pushing back. We use all three.
Ask why about everything, especially the things nobody questions anymore. That flicker of dread when a task shows up is a signal, not a mood.
Ask “What can we stop doing?” before “What should we add?” Sunk cost and affection keep bad work alive long after it stops paying off.
Deletion creates a void. Fill it on purpose, with the work only our people can do. Every hour we return should go to the mission, not to new busywork.
Before anything else, put these to the thing in front of you:
If both answers are “not really,” you’ve found slop, the self-made busywork that feels like progress and isn’t. Simplify, Ch. 8 — Slop →
From Simplify
Once you’ve confronted a task, Simplify says you have four moves: stop it, do it less often, delegate it, or simplify it. Here’s how that maps onto the decisions this team publishes.
| Simplify’s move | Our decision | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Stop it | Eliminated | The report, form, or meeting ends. The hours go back to the people who did it. |
| Do it less often | Modified | Monthly becomes quarterly. Weekly becomes as-needed. |
| Simplify it | Modified Consolidated | Fewer fields, fewer approvers, fewer steps. Or fold two overlapping things into one. |
| Delegate it | Modified | Move it to the right owner, or let a tool do it. AI should subtract work, not add it. |
Not sure whether something matters? Pause it, and restore only what people actually miss. When AT&T tried this with its internal reports, most of them never came back.
The people filling out the form know which parts are pointless. That’s why anyone can submit here, anonymously if they like, with no gatekeeping.
AI can bury us in more drafts, more decks, and more options. We point it the other way: the Meeting Test uses AI to find the meeting you don’t need to hold.
From Smart Brevity
A decision nobody reads hasn’t been communicated. Every submission and every published decision here follows the same three-part shape from Smart Brevity.
One strong sentence: what it is, or what we decided. If people read nothing else, they still know.
One or two sentences of context: who it affects, and what changes for them.
The detail, for anyone who wants it, kept short and skimmable. Depth is an offer, not a requirement.
Write for the person who has to act on it, not for the committee that approved it. Picture one real reader.
Every decision in the log leads with the call itself. Not the background, not the process. The answer.
Name the decision, write the agenda, invite only the people with a role. If you can’t, it isn’t a meeting. That’s the Meeting Test.
And Four of Our Own
People bring us solutions before they’ve defined the problem. So we ask, in this order, and we keep asking periodically about the solutions we already run:
Don’t try to solve every problem.
Invite people to the table who have something to contribute: the people actively working on the project. Not someone’s supervisor, and certainly not the supervisor’s supervisor. If someone’s there for their information, that could have been an email.
Every team should be able to say: “We’re coming together to work on this project, for this long, toward these outcomes, measured by this.” Fixed scope and an end date are the default. Perpetual teams should be rare.
If you need an information meeting, make it a frequent standup: everyone stands, one minute each on a ruthless timer, follow-ups only for the people who need more. Do that, and most everything else happens outside of meetings.
Standup timer →Put It to Work
A report nobody reads. A form that asks for what we already have. Run the two questions, then send it in.
Submit →Before you send the invite, find out whether it should be a meeting at all.
Meeting Test →See what we stopped, what we kept, and the reasoning behind each call.
Decision Log →
