I Want an Accountant Who Goes Home at Six

I was in a meeting today and one of the attendees is a tax professional. It’s tax season of course, so she was explaining that she will be working until midnight.

Maybe I’m odd, but my first reaction is that I don’t want my taxes to be prepared by someone at midnight. Or 11 PM or 10 PM. In fact, I don’t want my taxes prepard by someone who was up until midnight last night either!

I want my taxes prepared by someone who is fresh and well rested – and on top of their game.

I don’t want my accounting handled by someone at 11 PM.

I don’t want my tech support handled by someone at 10 PM.

I don’t want my surgery to be performed by a doctor in the last two hours of a ten hour shift.

I don’t want my legal documents reviewed by an attorney after ten hours at the office.

Do you see the pattern here? We all see this behavior in others. We know that they have diminishing returns. We don’t want them at their worst. We want them at their best. We don’t want to pay full price for the ninth or tenth or eleventh hour of work.

When you see someone working like this day after day, you know that they are mostly spinning their wheels and becoming less productive every hour. And after several days of overworking, they are becoming less productive every day.

It can be very frustrating when my flight is cancelled because the pilots sat around waiting for delays until the FAA says that they have to go home because they’ve been on duty too long. But the FAA knows a very clear truth: People make more mistakes when they are tired. Mistakes can kill people.

And What About You?

It’s easy to see this behavior in others, but what about yourself? Are you overworking day after day? How productive are you in the last hour of your long work day?

When most of us make mistakes, no one dies. But that doesn’t mean that we are doing good work, or that our clients are getting their money’s worth. Certainly, our families are not getting what they deserve when we are working eleven or twelve hours in a day.

When you collapse at the end of the week and are “useless” to your family, then you really need to re-evaluate why you’re working so hard.

Under-serving your clients (or boss) while under-serving your family is the only long-term result of chronic over-working.

🙂