Quick Take
- Narration: Romi Neustadt self-narrates with the energy of a keynote speaker who built her brand from the ground up, direct, unguarded, and genuinely galvanizing in the right passages.
- Themes: Priorities, boundaries, redefining success for women, rejecting the myth of simultaneous everything
- Mood: Upbeat and blunt, conversational in a way that feels like a good friend who doesn’t sugarcoat
- Verdict: Smart, practical, and genuinely funny in places, Neustadt’s central argument is not new, but she argues it with enough specificity and personal credibility to make it feel freshly useful.
I was about fifteen minutes into this one before I realized I had started smiling without noticing. Romi Neustadt has a gift for the energetic specific, she doesn’t talk about “work-life balance” in the abstract when she can instead talk about saying no to the fifth request from your kid’s school for home-baked goods without a spiral of guilt. That kind of precision, deployed with genuine comic timing, is what distinguishes the audiobook from a hundred similar titles in this space.
You Can Have It All, Just Not at the Same Damn Time is Neustadt’s second book, following Get Over Your Damn Self, which built her audience largely through direct sales and network marketing communities. This follow-up is aimed more broadly at women who want to live more intentional lives, professionally, relationally, and personally, and feel perpetually behind on all three. Neustadt’s argument is that “having it all” is real, but sequential rather than simultaneous. What you have to do first is figure out what “all” actually means to you, and then be ruthless about clearing space for it.
The Priority Architecture at the Heart of the Book
The core of Neustadt’s method is what she frames as a priority-based approach to life design. This sounds obvious until she starts unpacking the ways most people think they have priorities when they actually have preferences, things they’d like to do when they’re not busy doing everything else that other people need from them. The distinction she draws between saying yes to a request and saying no to a dream is not merely rhetorical. She builds specific structures around it: clarity-finding exercises, boundary-setting conversations, daily habit designs that protect the time required for whatever actually matters to you.
Neustadt narrates with the confidence of a coach who has delivered this material to rooms full of women who initially pushed back and then came back later to report it worked. Her pacing is quick without being frantic, and she has the public speaker’s skill of landing a line and then letting it sit for exactly the right beat before moving on. The 4.7 rating from nearly 200 listeners reflects an audience that came away genuinely changed rather than merely entertained.
What She Gets Right About Imposter Syndrome
The section on imposter syndrome, or more precisely, on “feeling like an imposter in your own life”, is one of the book’s more unexpected turns. Neustadt is not primarily a psychological writer, but she identifies something real here: the specific dissonance of having built a life that looks successful from the outside while experiencing it as not-quite-real from the inside. Her approach is less therapeutic than practical. She is asking you to look at whose definition of success you have been building toward, and whether that definition has anything to do with your own actual desires.
She also handles the fear section with more directness than most books of this type. The specific fears she names, fear of not being lovable enough, pretty enough, good enough, are ones most women’s professional development books mention and then move past quickly. Neustadt returns to them and offers practical dismantling exercises, which is more useful than acknowledgment followed by inspirational pivot.
Where the Self-Narration Adds and Where It Occasionally Strains
Neustadt is clearly a natural speaker, and this is where self-narration is at its strongest: she has been saying versions of this material out loud for years, and the text knows it. The anecdotes are well-timed, the punchlines land, and the moments of genuine vulnerability, she shares personal failures with uncommon specificity, feel earned rather than inserted for relatability. The one area where the performance can get slightly repetitive is in the high-energy motivational passages, where the tone stays consistently pitched up for extended stretches. If you are the kind of listener who needs tonal variation, these sections may require a slightly different kind of attention.
One reviewer described feeling that Neustadt “has just gotten into the brains and hearts of so many women”, and the self-narration accelerates that quality. There is no interpreter between the author and the reader here, and for this kind of material, that directness is the right choice.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
This book will work best for women who are genuinely overcommitted, to other people, to outdated identity narratives, to a version of success they never consciously chose, and are ready for a frank conversation about what they actually want. Listeners who prefer a more analytical or research-driven approach to the work-life question should look elsewhere. Neustadt is not building an argument from evidence; she is building a case from lived experience and coaching observations, and the book is stronger when you receive it on those terms. At six and a half hours, it is also one of the more manageable listens in this batch, a good companion for the week you finally decide to stop saying yes to everything.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to have read Get Over Your Damn Self before listening to this one?
No. You Can Have It All, Just Not at the Same Damn Time is completely self-contained. References to Neustadt’s first book appear briefly in the context of establishing her audience, but nothing in this book depends on prior familiarity with her work.
The title implies a specific thesis. Does the book actually deliver on the ‘sequential, not simultaneous’ framework?
Yes, and in more structural detail than the casual tone of the title might suggest. Neustadt builds real exercises and frameworks around the priority-based approach. The conversational register doesn’t mean the content is thin.
Neustadt comes from a network marketing background. Does that affect the tone or credibility of the book?
The book’s origin in that community is evident in its energetic, coach-style delivery. Readers from outside that world may notice the motivational register, but the practical content is not industry-specific and applies broadly. The book has been received well beyond that initial audience.
Is the audiobook particularly well-suited to Neustadt’s style, or would the print edition serve equally well?
The audiobook is the stronger format for this material. Neustadt is a trained public speaker whose timing and inflection are built into the way she delivers the content. Much of the book’s energy and humor comes through in performance in a way that flat prose on a page would not capture as fully.
