Power Hours for Tasks and Other Time Management Tips for Tax Pros

It may almost be the new year, but if you’re a seasoned tax professional, you undoubtedly feel your busiest season creeping up. The late hours, the long weekends, the incessant client questions and endless appointments. The stress and overwhelm. The exhaustion.

It’s all coming toward you like an unstoppable hurricane. There’s no escaping tax season—after all, it’s your bread and butter.

But your most lucrative time of year shouldn’t have to come at the cost of your mental health, physical health, emotional well-being, relationships, and passion for your work. And it doesn’t have to. Sure, a great number of tax professionals struggle with time management and that struggle is amplified during tax season, sabotaging productivity and efficiency when there’s more to do and more at stake. But there are actions you can take now to better prepare for your busiest season of the year.

Start implementing the following time management strategies now so you can effectively incorporate them into your routine and have a more successful, less stressful tax season sans overwhelm and exhaustion.

Establish Boundaries With Your Clients

Set clear expectations with your clients on communication so you can provide high-quality service , and make sure there are clear boundaries when both parties feel the pressure of the looming deadline. Inform your clients of the hours you are open and your preferred communication method. Using a recorded message and email autoreply, let clients know how quickly they can expect a voicemail or email response to so they don’t get antsy and continue reaching out with duplicate messages.

Make scheduling client appointments a breeze by using a scheduling platform like ScheduleOnce that enables you to set the hours you will be taking appointments. Clients can then book their appointments by clicking a link you send them and choosing the most convenient time slot available. Doing so prevents a lot of unnecessary back and forth over appointment requests for times you don’t plan to be working or for times that have already been booked.

Better Manage Interruptions

An Accountemps survey revealed that workers find chatting and socializing their biggest distractions on the job. While controlling others’ behavior is not fully possible, managing interruptions is because you can control how you make yourself available to them. Create regular meetings in which you can address all of their non-urgent questions and concerns.

Similarly, post open office hours in which both your staff and colleagues are welcome to drop in and discuss anything on their mind, be it the game last night or your new dog. This could be once a week or a couple of 10-minute windows a day.

If others know they’ll receive your undivided attention during regularly scheduled meetings or open office hours, they will be much less likely to interrupt you at their convenience. Interruptions lasting only a minute throughout the day can add up to giant gaps in your productivity.

Process Your Emails

Email is the bane of many tax professionals’ existence. Open it first thing in the morning without a plan and you could look back up from your inbox at lunchtime wondering where all the time went and having accomplished very little. Whip your inbox into shape so it is much more manageable come tax season by getting in the habit of processing your emails versus checking them.

Checking emails is a natural tendency that involves scanning through emails and leaving many of them to deal with “later” or perhaps “cherry-picking” which emails to respond to. Checking emails throughout the day results in greater stress, a cluttered inbox, missed emails and opportunities, and overlooked tasks. Instead, schedule 15-minute blocks of time each day to process your emails. This requires one of the following actions on every email the first (and only) time you open it, resulting in a manageable, organized inbox:

Delete
Forward (delegate)
Reply, then file or delete
File (keep)
Schedule (create task)

Commit to only being in your inbox during your scheduled times and make it a point to process your emails so they don’t take up residence in your inbox.

Do Power Hours for Small Tasks

Just as action must be taken on every email you open, action must be taken on every call you answer, voicemail you listen to, letter you receive, and document that lands on your desk. Just because an action needs to be taken doesn’t mean it needs to be taken right now. Interrupting your workflow to complete a menial, non-urgent task such as paying a bill, reviewing a document, or finding a misplaced engagement letter would only sabotage your efficiency.

A better system is to capture all those small tasks that take only a few minutes and add them to a power hour task list. Add the corresponding paperwork and electronic documents to either your power hour paper file or digital file. Then, during your scheduled power hour every Friday, use batching to quickly knock out all those small and specific tasks that piled up over the week back-to-back with the utmost efficiency.

Not only do power hours improve your workflow because they allow you to stay focused, but they also help you clean the slate for a fresh start on Monday. They also prevent minor tasks from falling through the cracks and potentially becoming major fires that need to be put out.

Your office is soon to become an even more fast-paced, demanding work environment, one you need to be prepared for if you want to come out unscathed on April 18. The influx of clients into your office and meetings into your schedule makes having great time management skills of paramount importance. Arm yourself with these effective time management strategies that are proven to reduce stress, increase efficiency, and put you in control of your schedule instead of allowing your schedule to control you throughout tax season.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Amber De La Garza, known as the Productivity Specialist, helps small business owners maximize profits, reduce stress, and make time for what matters most by improving time management and elevating productivity. A coach, trainer, speaker, and writer, she is also the host of the Productivity Straight Talk Podcast and creator of Leverage Lab®.