Emily Austen
Little, Brown Spark
2 September 2025
164
eBook - EPUB
Non-Fiction
ARC via Edelweiss
Being busy has become a status symbol, often seen as a sign of success. The "more is more" mindset dominates, leaving us exhausted and drained. We struggle to juggle work, family, mental health, and personal challenges, all while believing that long hours, excessive caffeine, and constant hustle lead to achievement. Instead, many of us are burnt out and less motivated than ever. That’s where SMARTER comes in.
SMARTER redefines the notion that overworking equals success. It highlights that those who work smarter, not harder, achieve greater long-term success. With 10 actionable steps and insights from successful entrepreneur E. M. Austen, SMARTER will help you shift your mindset from scarcity to abundance. You’ll learn how to join the 8 AM club, detox from busyness, define your own success, track your energy instead of your time, set healthy boundaries, and focus on one task at a time, among many other strategies. This guide empowers you to embrace your strengths, enhance your productivity, and create a sustainable work-life balance.
This isn’t for those who settle for "bare minimum Mondays" or "take it easy Tuesdays." It’s for ambitious individuals who want to achieve it all, who understand that you must invest effort to reap rewards. It’s for those who have something to prove—the overlooked, the underappreciated, the full-timers, and those still on their journey to success.
With this essential guide, you won’t need to unlearn what you’ve been taught; instead, you’ll modify your existing knowledge to unlock your potential and lead a SMARTER life.
I saw Smarter available for review at a time when I was feeling overwhelmed by things I had to do and constantly fatigued, so I wondered if it would contain any useful advice for me. The answer: maybe, but not as much as I'd hoped. Let me reverse my usual practices and do the negatives first, and in this case the main negative was that the information in the book was already 85% familiar to me. If you have read even one book on this basic topic in the past you'll already have encountered a large number of the ideas presented. The other thing I struggled with was the author's digressions into complaining about how women have it tougher on multiple occasions. I felt that was not the purpose of the book and that these feminist messages diverged too much from what I had wanted to learn from the text. For the positives, the book was generally well presented, the information clear, and one or two ideas were new to me or at least different takes on things I had heard before. One of the ideas I will try to incorporate into my own life to see if it helps me. Overall, I am giving this book 3 stars. It may not be worth reading if you have already read extensively on this theme, but if you are new to it, this book contains many ideas you may find interesting.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
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