Get Your Shit Together by Sarah Knight

Get Your Shit Together
Sarah Knight
January 2017
Hachette Publishers

I’m not going to lie. The title of this book was enough to make me want to read it. Get Your Shit Together by Sarah Knight is a no f*cks given, no-holds-barred guide to living your best life. It’s aimed at people who can never seem to find their keys or their wallet, or who are always late, or always complaining about the size of their inbox. It’s for those people who exhaust you and you always think to yourself: Seriously, get your shit together.

Sarah, described as the ‘anti-guru’, gives us advice to make our lives easier and better. She gives tips for managing your inbox, or your organisational level, or your daily planner. She gives us the signs to look for when we definitely don’t have our shit together, and she is extremely blunt when doing so.

“(This book) is more of a let-me-help-you-help-yourself-help book, with “me” here to “help” when your “self” gets in the way. Let’s face it- if you could help yourself, you’d have done it by now, right? Also, unlike many traditional self-help authors, I am going to use the word shit 332 times (including several shitmanteaus of my own invention), so please do not go on Amazon saying you were expecting sunshine and kittens and got shitstorms and shittens.”

She takes us through three simple tools for getting (and keeping) our shit together:
1. The Power of Negative Thinking
2. How to balance work and fun and save money while you’re at it
3. Ways to manage anxiety

The book is not only informative, it’s very funny. Side notes and authorial comments provide humour to the book and make the reader enjoy being told to get their shit together.

Sarah helps readers set goals, meet them, and be on time to everything they plan to attend. Her previous book The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck was an instant bestseller and this latest book has the same blunt, unapologetic attitude to it. She gives some dietary advice in the book and even uses the three different chipmunks from Alvin and the Chipmunks to help readers recognise what kind of personality they have.

“At this point, we’re living in a post-tidying society. … People get their tidying groove on for a few months, or even just a few weeks, and then… kinda lose the thread. … Why is that? Well, I submit that if they had their sh*t together in the first place, the tidying bug would have stuck.”

Get Your Shit Together is meant to liberate you from the things that you think you should be doing and instead, get started on the things you actually want to do. The book includes flow charts and graphs and colouring pages and countless hilarious jokes. The reader also learns a lot about Sarah throughout the book. She suffered a lot of panic attacks at work and didn’t know what to do about them. She then quit her job in corporate America after realising just how much she hated it. She built a house in Caribbean and moved there. She had to get her shit together, and now she’s teaching the rest of us how to do it.

Raw, honest and hilarious! This should be required reading for many people.

Thank you to Hachette Publishers for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.