📝 usncan Note: For Emily Austen, The Smarter Way To Succeed Starts At 8AM
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Emily Austen, author of SMARTER, Photo Credit: Courtesy of Emily Austen
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Emily Austen
When Taylor Swift drops a life lesson on the New Heights podcast, the world listens. I’m referring to the mic drop heard around the world: “Think of your energy as if it’s expensive, as if it’s a luxury item. Not everyone can afford it… What you spend your energy on – that’s the day.”
It’s a powerful reminder to track your energy, not just your time. And it’s a principle that serves as a key lesson in Emily Austen’s debut book, Smarter.
The connection is almost poetic: Taylor Swift, the songwriter of a generation, citing the same productivity lesson as a modern-day Austen. And Emily herself isn’t just any Austen: she’s a descendant of Jane Austen, the original chronicler of women navigating ambition, social expectation and self-definition. Over two centuries later, Emily Austen is doing something similar: reframing what success means, in a period of performative busyness.
It’s the kind of mantra that feels tailor-made for our burned out, “productivity theater” era. Because let’s be honest: busyness has become a form of currency and the ultimate flex. Screenshots of 5AM wake-ups, cold plunges, and “hustle and grind” reels have turned into a competitive sport (also known as fauxductivity).
Founders and executives one-upping each other online has created what Austen calls an “approval addiction cycle.” She says: “People post their packed calendars, their routines… it’s not about value creation, it’s about validation.” Austen, who is a self-described recovering productivity addict, is now offering something refreshingly different – and it’s striking a chord.
Her debut book, Smarter, has already become a bestseller in the UK and Australia, has landed on the University of Miami’s recommended reading list, and secured translation deals in markets like Europe and Asia. Stateside, it’s hitting shelves tomorrow, on September 2.
By 25, Austen had already hit burnout, battled mental health struggles and faced a financial rock bottom. Today, the Manchester University graduate with a degree in Criminology and Criminal Law, is a thriving CEO and agency founder: proof that success doesn’t have to come from bottomless caffeine, 5AM alarms, or grind culture.
Smarter distills this lesson into a manifesto for working differently: practical, actionable strategies to hit your goals without burning out in the process.
Smarter has also found cultural traction: Bella Hadid requested a copy while in London for her fragrance launch, Julia Roberts had one delivered to the Warner Bros. set in the UK, and Jessica Alba was spotted at Wimbledon with a copy.
The virality is real, but the message is what matters most: Smarter is about shifting the definition of success away from volume and toward impact. It’s about incremental consistent changes that add up to a seismic shift.
Emily Austen, author of SMARTER, Photo Credit: Courtesy of Emily Austen
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Emily Austen
Each of the 10 steps in the framework for how to work “smarter” starts with the letter “M”: Mornings, Message, Minutes, Mind(ful), Manage, Modify, Marketing, Mastery, Move, Momentum. (A fun twist, as Emily Austen often goes by “Em.”)
It opens with this disclaimer: “This is not for fans of bare-minimum Mondays or take-it-easy Tuesdays. It’s for those who strive for success.”
It’s permission to follow a different playbook for success, which rejects hustle culture, burnout and wearing busyness as a badge of honor. This playbook leans into principles like setting boundaries, operating from your own set of values, self-worth > people pleasing, operating from a place of abundance, the magic of one step = momentum, and following your own circadian rhythm.
The spark for Smarter came in the summer of 2023, when Austen found herself scrolling through Amazon’s bestseller charts. “There were no female authors in career, entrepreneurship or business,” she recalls. “It was all men. Brilliant men, like James Clear, Seth Godin, Ben Horowitz, Malcolm Gladwell. But even those books were either quite self-helpy, or they were really shouting aggressively, things like HOW TO CREATE WEALTH in all caps.”
Meanwhile, the female authors topping the charts were leaning into themes of meditation, manifestation and mindfulness. “I realized there was space for a book that sat in between,” Austen explains. “Grounded, practical and accessible to people beyond just entrepreneurs.”
Austen had the receipts to back up that hunch. She spent more than a decade running her award-winning PR agency, Emerge, working with brands from Abercrombie and Spanx to Red Bull and RewardStyle. That real-world immersion gave her a vantage point on ambition, burnout and impact.
“So often, (perceived) value is about how many meetings do you have, how many tabs do you have open… it’s all volume. And I started to think, well, if you could do the same job in two hours instead of six, you wouldn’t be worse at your job. You’d probably be better because it means you’re able to do it more efficiently.”
One of the stickiest ideas to emerge from Smarter is permission to join the “8AM Club”: a cheeky counterpoint to the cult of the “5AM Club” (Robin Sharma’s book of the same name is still one of the bestselling personal growth and self-optimization books in the world, seven years after publication.)
“I got up at 5am for ten years, and I was miserable,” Austen says. “Exhausted, over-caffeinated, constantly chasing my day.”
The shift came when she allowed herself to work in her own rhythm. “The moment I stopped forcing myself into someone else’s routine and paid attention to what was natural for me, I became far more productive,” she explains.
Her readers and listeners of the Smater podcast agree. Thousands have messaged her saying they finally feel “seen”: no longer guilty for not waking up before dawn to fit the mold of peak productivity. “The 8AM Club isn’t about laziness,” Austen clarifies. “It’s about recognizing that productivity is personal. For some, it’s 8AM. For others, it might be 7:30AM.”
Emily Austen, author of SMARTER and host of the SMARTER podcast, Photo Credit: Courtesy of Emily Austen
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Emily Austen
The point is: you don’t need to force yourself into a mold of productivity to prove your ambition. How you work isn’t one-size-fits-all.
Austen is blunt about the culture we’ve created. “We’ve entered an era of approval addiction,” she says. “Busyness has become currency.”
She points to founders posting screenshots of their jam-packed calendars, execs showing off productivity hacks, or the cliché “founder starter pack.” “It’s not value creation,” she says. “It’s a highlight reel of busyness. And people are exhausted by it.”
What struck me most during our conversation was this: the founders who are quietest online are usually the ones busiest building. Isn’t real focus the ultimate flex?
That’s the tension Smarter explores: the difference between performative success and sustainable impact.
Austen has taken her message inside corporations, where the symptoms of overwork are impossible to ignore.
“There’s so much literature on how to avoid burnout, or how to spot it,” she says. “But the reality is, many people are already in it. They don’t want to be told to journal for an hour and a half in the morning. They want hope that the way things are now isn’t how they’ll be for the next decade.”
(According to this McKinsey report, Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th-anniversary report, burnout is higher than ever, while the ‘broken rung’ remains a significant barrier to women’s advancement, especially for women of color. According to an AMA 2025 survey, 55% of women are feeling burnout, compared to 42% of men.
Austen’s work-life balance approach is less about optimization and more about permission: to reclaim your rhythm, your definitions, your energy. Permission to imagine another way forward. Permission to reject shame around rest or tackling to-dos in a way that works for you.
For Austen, success isn’t about waking up before dawn, showing off how many meetings you’ve crammed into your calendar, or proving your worth with hustle reels. It’s about creating impact without exhausting yourself in the process.
“The thing I hear over and over is that people are tired of measuring their lives by someone else’s definition of productivity,” she says. “They want something sustainable.”
The 5AM Club had its time. But maybe the future of ambition looks more like the 8AM Club: rested, intentional, and, as Austen would say, smarter.
