One of my closest friends laughed as she gave me this book – we are still speaking, despite the implication that I clearly did not have my sh*t together!

I have never read a ‘self-help’ book before, so I had no idea what to expect from this one – the title made me laugh and the tag line made me think so that was a good start.

As the title may indicate, this is not your ‘usual’ self-help book – there is a substantial amount of profanity most of which is amusing but occasionally is slightly overbearing. However, I found the ‘Correspondence Course’ section enlightening and have been managing my inbox much more successfully than before (though I appreciate that some of you may doubt this if you have had to wait for a reply recently, I’m still working on it). Key quotes for managing your inbox as follows:

“There is one simple tactic you can employ to reduce the number of messages you get. You can reduce the number that you send.”

“Before you start typing, ask yourself: does this even fucking matter? Half the time, it doesn’t.”

And the best tactic for managing your inbox – setting time aside and blitzing it (I’ve started doing this on Fridays), literally go through everything and follow the delete, file, reply method as described in my favourite quote of all:

“Butt in the seat, delete, delete, delete.
Go the extra mile and file, file, file.
Don’t be that guy: Reply, reply reply!”

Sarah Knight covers lots of other areas of life as well, but one that really resonated with me was the “Me time” is a right, not a privilege” section, I have really struggled with this since starting my own business, there is literally never enough time to do everything that needs to be done (including the full time job of running said business, the other full time job of running a family and training for my next triathlon – I know, just because I didn’t have quite enough to do) that I never have time for things I’d like to do (scrapbooking, reading a book, talking to my husband). I haven’t actually managed to implement this yet but “A highly effective way to increase time spent on a hobby is to let yourself spend time on a hobby to remind yourself how much joy it brings.” As a first step I have actually cleared my scrapbooking corner so I can see the desk and have actually printed out a photo to scrapbook so I live in hope of a page actually happening sometime soon.

You can buy Get Your Sh*t Together from Waterstones – I strongly recommend it purely for its inbox strategy!