4 Tips to Help Accountants to Unplug After Tax Season

Whether it’s your first or fifteenth tax season, one fact remains the same: making it through those hectic few weeks in April (or whenever your client industry does taxes) is a challenge. Simply getting through your workload feels challenging enough, but accounting professionals also have to show up at their best to deliver what their clients need.

Even those of us with a significant capacity for client work honed through years of tax seasons feel exhausted and overwhelmed once this part of the calendar is over.

It’s fairly common practice in the industry to take some time off after tax season. We’ve encountered some companies that even close their offices for a day or two, giving their team a much-needed break.

How exactly should you go about taking a break? We’re not going to plan a golf trip or Caribbean vacation for you, but we can recommend a few helpful tips that can make your time away more fulfilling and help you hit the ground running when you get back to the office.

Make sure to actually unplug

Today’s era of mobile devices and cloud computing is great for flexibility. Thanks to powerful document management software, bookkeepers and their team members can work from any location—the days of trekking into the office every business day to access company files and tools for work are mostly behind us.

But there’s a downside to having the ability to stay connected to work around the clock: it can be tough to fully disconnect yourself when you’re so easily accessible. You pick up your phone during an off day, intending to answer a call or text message from a loved one when suddenly you find yourself jumping into your work inbox “just to check in real quick.”

A few of these “quick check-ins” and suddenly, you’re basically back to working normally. Even though you may justify it by telling yourself the majority of your day won’t be about work, your mind doesn’t ever get the chance to fully unplug from work.

Believe it or not, downtime is critical to high performance. Scientific studies show that even when you are resting or idle, your mind is busy sifting through data, making connections, and creatively solving problems using your unconscious mind.

In fact, seminal research on the brain by scientists at Washington University discovered that the brain uses a significant amount of energy, even at rest.

Serious downtime without thinking about work is vital to performing your best—don’t fake it!

Follow other industries to pick up ideas

While it’s important to disconnect from the specifics of your work during downtime, you can still spend some time thinking about your business in a broader sense.

One of the best ways to do this is to take a look at the practices of other industries that you aren’t as familiar with.

This is a common practice in many creative fields. Visual artists, for example, often take cues from musicians who, in turn, are frequently inspired by poets and other writers. Even though there’s a big physical difference between painting a picture and playing a keyboard, both processes are connected.

Running a business can be the same way, especially across professional services fields. For example, there might be a big difference in the type of work your accounting firm does compared to a law firm or a home services contractor, but at the end of the day, you’re still being paid to perform a service requiring specific technical skills. While you’re unplugging from the day-to-day concerns of your office, you can study how organizations in other sectors handle common tasks like sales, marketing, hiring, internal operations, and more.

See how others in your organization handle additional responsibility

When you aren’t working normally in your firm, there’s probably at least a partial gap in the leadership decision-making process. In normal cases, you might inform your clients and team that they should expect a delay in responses, or that you’ll get back to them when you return.

Instead of this strategy, why not use the time out of the office to see how others on your team handle the additional responsibility? This approach is especially valuable if there’s someone at the management level that wants to move into executive leadership, or an individual contributor looking to get into management.

You don’t have to ask someone to completely replace what’s missing from the firm when you’re away, but even incrementally starting this process could help you find hidden leadership talents among your existing team.

Leverage automation to stay in touch

As we mentioned earlier in this article, the ease with which technology allows us to stay connected is a double-edged sword.

On the positive side, you can use automation tools to communicate with your clients and team members, even when you aren’t physically working. With a few well-timed email sequences or social media campaigns, the people you reach out to may not even realize that you’re not working your normal schedule. Just be sure that if someone at the firm needs to be reached by a client or vendor, they know who to contact.

Final word: downtime is not optional

Whether you’re into active vacations or would rather be snoozing under a palm tree, it’s vital that you plan time off in your schedule. Not only is time away from work beneficial for your mental health, but it can actually increase your performance by refreshing your energy and adding a dose of creativity to your normal work.

Through the use of modern software tools like accounting practice management software, you can ensure your firm stays running as smoothly as possible while you’re getting some much-deserved vacation time.

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