Jim VandeHei
He co-founded and runs Axios, and before that co-founded Politico, after years as a political reporter at the Washington Post.
“It turns out that most of us at work are spending anywhere from 25 to 50% of our day doing things that should never be done.”
This is Gavin Newsom · October 2026
The Axios co-founder describes an internal exercise asking every employee for the three things that matter most in their job, three things they think are pointless, and three that should be automated. He says both productivity and happiness went up, and the exercise became the basis for his book.
Transcript
And the whole idea was like, I'm a journalist at heart, so I'm watching people all the time, but I'm an operator.
I run a company.
…that people were doing that they didn't need to be doing. And that often people didn't even understand in order the things that they should be doing to be even better and enjoy their job even more. We did it and boom, productivity went up, but not just productivity, happiness went up because people like doing things they're good at. They hate doing things they shouldn't do. Dug into the data, it turns out that most of us at work are spending anywhere from 25 to 50% of our day doing things that should never be done. And We then apply that outside of work, which is, okay, the truth is we're hit with too much stuff. And unless we have some kind of mental or physical exercise to force ourselves to take inventory about what matters in life, what matters at work, and then ruthlessly revisit that. and delete the things that we shouldn't be doing so that you can amplify the things that you want to do. And it might…
And I love that. I mean, this is a book, to your point, I mean, you've been wildly successful. People know your work, obviously at Politico, but You were able to sell, but you're still at Axios. And if that was even half of the reported figure, you're doing fine. And so I love the spirit that…
Yeah, I mean, think about it.
The confront part is we never ask, why are we doing this? We just say yes, or we just take this meeting, or we just do that task. Just take a minute to be like, why? Why am I doing this? Does it actually need to be done? And it really starts, like we talk about in the book, this idea, if you just…
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