During tax season especially, I’ve noticed tax professionals love to be active, but in their busyness they don’t accomplish as much as they think they do.
If you could do nothing else but cut 50% of your activity disguised as accomplishment, your profits would skyrocket and you’d have all the time you needed to do the things you say you want to get done in your business.
Activity is easy to recognize. Just look at the normal routine in your office. The busyness when the phone rings or when the clients walk in, or whatever projects you’re working on. During tax season, you can have twenty things on your to-do list each day; nevertheless, only two or three items are completed. Why? Because when you walked in your office, all hell breaks loose.
Everyone wants a piece of you:
- the office equipment doesn’t work,
- some technology procedure is messed up
- your clients are mad because (pick a number)
- that file is missing
- blah, blah, blah
The Good Side of Increased Activity
There are many clients coming into your office. All the technology is working right, and all your clients are being taken care of well. Your employees are working smart and you’re feeling good about the flow of your office. As the owner, you’re walking around answering questions and helping solve problems. Employees are taking care of the immediate tasks on their plate and basically, everyone in the office seems to be doing what they are supposed to do during tax season. There’s a lot of activity … BUT how much of that activity is accomplishment and leading you closer towards your goals?
Accomplishment is getting the right things done. Accomplishment always describes your priorities in the past tense.
Highest level accomplishment can immediately be linked to profit margin or tracked as directly contributing to your stated goals.
This is key.
Accomplishment is getting stuff done that actually gets you closer to your goals or what you say is important to your tax business.
Tax business owners set goals for tax season. Some will even write these goals down on paper. Better yet, you might even take each goal and add three to five action steps detailing what must happen to achieve each goal.
But the problem is, when tax season comes, you’re spending your time (or your employees’ time) in increased activity instead of “working your goals.” This doesn’t match with what you said you needed to do to be successful in your tax business.
Accomplishment is what leads you to your dreams.
It’s what successful people thrive on. As the owner, you must accomplish what you say is important and delegate or dump the other activities that aren’t as important.
The Secret Sauce for Success
If you truly want to move to the head of the line professionally (or in any area of your life) then follow this Simple Four-Step Formula.
There are ONLY Four Steps!
- Decide what you want to get done today.
- Assign each project a specific block of time.
- Script your day in 15-minute to hourly time blocks in priority order.
- Bar all distractions and interruptions until you’re done.
What I just said is very simple, but very hard to do. However, if you work at this simple formula every day, its impact on your life will be a game-changer. You say you want to reach your dreams … so DO these four steps.
This formula is the secret sauce for success. You don’t need a bunch of fancy computer technologies or smart phone gizmos or the next greatest celebrity brand or whatever else someone told you was needed for success.
What I’m talking about is self-governance. (This is not time management.)
This is about you, the owner, starting your day knowing the important things that must get done for you to be more successful. You do not make a to-do list. You make a DONE list. Decide what will get done today – and do it. (There is a huge difference here.)
About the Author
