If you are struggling to make profit, you are not sleeping well.
If you are working hard to make profit, you are not sleeping well.
Profit AND sleep seem to be poles apart. You can either have profit; or have sleep; not both! Well, do you feel it’s been like that for years now?
Why? There is just one reason. And if you do just one thing, you can have both – profit AND sleep.
And that one reason and the one key that can get you Profit AND Sleep is…..
In a research on decision fatigue, it was found that making choices led to reduced self-control i.e., less physical stamina, reduced persistence in the face of failure, more procrastination, and less quality and quantity of arithmetic calculations. In a nutshell, the research suggests that the more decisions we make, the worse we get at making them. Why not conserve that decision-making energy for the things that really matter? It’s one of the many unexpected happiness strategies author Paul Dolan outlines in his new book, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think.
As Pransform serves the accounting and tax profession, I am taking an example of a typical player in the accounting services profession; but the ideas here will apply to many professions. So please read on for just three minutes and I am sure you’ll be glad you did.
Evidence in further studies suggested that choosing is more depleting than merely deliberating and forming preferences about options. In other words, the more you have to consider before choosing your action, the less self-control you will have. So the first and foremost strategy is to have as less decision-making choices as possible. And you can do so by keeping only the important decisions with you. For example, President Barack Obama has only two colors of suits – Blue and Gray!
Here are 8 things that will help you to create that “the one key” to have both, profit AND sleep, during your next tax season:
Decide: Decide right now, well in advance of the next tax season, to have lesser decision-making during the tax season. Stop “doing” things that involve making choices, specifically the most mundane, repetitive ones; but not directly responsible for getting the best return on your time.
Estimate: To know what you can leave to others to do, estimate the total time available to you during the tax season in which you can sell your highest value work. Any lower value work that eats into your higher value work time will reduce your profit, make you stretch for longer hours and result in lesser sleep.
Learn: Add to your knowledge the processes, technologies and habits that can reduce demand on your time. Learn of choices. Learn about resources, internal and external, that can DO the tasks for you.
Empower: Transition your knowledge about processes to someone else who can help you. The more you empower others (even if you are a solo practitioner), the less will be the number of decisions you have to make and then you can pick only the critical decisions to make yourself. Your clients will notice the improvement in quality of your deliverables.
Gather: Resources, Tools, Knowledge and Connections (RTWCs) – gather enough of them for you to focus on your most valuable competency and move other things to these RTWCs.
Access: Liberate from your desk and desktop. Mobility can not only save you tens of hundreds of commute time hours but will also give you flexibility to work when you want and need. Use remote connectivity, hosted data and cloud software.
Transform: Completely transform your processes to include collaborative, location-independent working. It’s like having help-on-demand. Its freedom from limiting factors.
Embrace: Resisting change in the hope of getting different results next tax season will change nothing. It IS possible to get profit AND sleep, when you embrace change.
It is all about just “The One Thing” : D.E.L.E.G.A.T.E.
Delegate. There are several people out there who can benefit from your real core expertise, if you have more time on hand. Don’t let those deserving people lose the opportunity to benefit from the real value you can deliver.
Accounting and tax professionals and firms delegate important but time consuming tasks to Pransform. Contact Us Now to be ready for your more profitable next tax season (and to enjoy much deserved sleep even during the busy season).