Productive Day

You know those jobs you have to do that you keep putting off, and they stay in either (a) your head; or (b) on your to do list; or (c) on a sticky note on the side of your PC? All the tasks around them get checked off so they are the only ones left on the page, or they keep you awake at night as little peas under the mattress making you wriggle and squirm, or the post it note has been there so long it has lost its stickiness and it keeps falling off the monitor?

We all have them, we all get bothered by them and we all put them off until we can no longer bear it.  Well you know those jobs?  Do you have any festering away?

Well I tackled one of my biggest and longest ones today and wow, do I feel better?  (yes is the answer in case you were wondering!)

A big part of my job is to get all the accounts data together in a format that I can send it off to our accountants so that they can do the legal (and tricky) job of preparing the Tax Returns.  The process is not so hard, just long and you have to be thorough and you have to follow a specific process.  The issue I had was that our accounting program we use in-house is not really designed to produce tax ready reports, but it does do a great job of tracking jobs and sales and inventory etc.  So I kinda have to wax the reports so that they are in a format that I can send to the wonderful boys who prepare our returns.  Being an all or nothing perfectionist, I knew I could not do this job to perfection like I crave.  Thus the big put-off.

A long running issue is the end of year rollover.  I can't rollover the year until all the accounts are reconciled.  I can't reconcile as some of the accounts are not able to be journaled.  Putting it off year after year hasn't helped any, and now I have a big and tricky job to fix it all and start a clean slate for the next financial year. 

Cue the putting off scene ... this was meant to be done back in March, my accountant has been waiting patiently since then.  I have been pondering how to do this for months, and I finally came up with what I (think) will work.

TODAY .. I knuckled down and did it.  Well I will be a little truthful and confess that I had spent 2 weeks doing every single other job on my list, and even some minor ones that did not rate even writing down.  I had completely run out of things to do and had absolutely no choice but to grit my yellow highlighter and get it done!  And you know what?  Of course you know ... It wasn't nearly as bad as I had built up in my mind (when will I ever learn this lesson?). 

So now I am feeling pretty good about myself and the fact I sent off the (very apologetic) email to my dear and sweet accountant, along with a 3 page report of the work done.

Step 2 can commence as soon as I hear back from him.  I will dedicate the next week to staying in focus on this task as I want a big red line crossed out on my task list for good.