Please do not expect much from me over the final two weeks of tax season. Feel free to read some of my previous posts. Or go outside and play. Or read a book. Enjoy yourselves. I shall emerge from my little cell and join you very, very soon.
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A tax accountant’s workspace. I looked up at one point this morning and thought “damn.” I had to share.
Just a friendly reminder. I’m still here. Tax season and (to the extent my comatose wife will allow, anyway) vacation planning may be monopolizing my prime blog-writing time right now, but I am trying to at least update the fotoblog fairly regularly. And I promise, at the first break in the tax action (taction?), I will be here spinning yarns, spewing vitriol and generally journaling the mundane life of the G-caster once again. Stay tuned. For a peek into the lives of accountants such as myself, check out this blog. It is all applicable. It is all true. As I have been spending more time in the office over the past week, I have had occasion to contemplate my own productivity. I am a productivity/organizational nut. I love figuring out ways to perform my daily tasks more efficiently. Before the arrival of the crackberry I would carry a folded index card in my pocket as my to-do list. Now I am all electronic, but the idea is the same. I love getting things done (GTD). The thing is: lately I have been so obsessed with streamlining my workflow and decluttering my life that I have actually become less efficient. It’s like I spend an hour brainstorming (or mining the internet) for the best way to do something instead of, you know, actually doing it. Sad. One of these days I will get everything organized “just right”. Then I will be able to get down to business. Below, you will find two lists – my favorite internet-based time-savers and time-wasters. Welcome to the little OCD world of a public accountant during tax season. Time-Savers: 1) Remember The Milk. It is my new index card. You can enter tasks, organize them by date or category, set up reminder alerts, and – most importantly – sync them all to your mobile device of choice. Extremely user-friendly, this application makes me feel more productive even if I am not accomplishing anything. Oh – and it’s free! 2) NetVibes / Google Reader. I am on the fence as to which one of these rss/atom feed readers I like the best. Right now I am using NetVibes, but I might go back to Reader – whose interface is a little bare-bones but seems to keep things more up-to-date. With NetVibes you can add all kinds of widgets, not just feeds… but I haven’t found the need for them. Either way, a good reader that puts all the sites I normally visit at my fingertips has become essential. Between my news feeds and my constant NPR softly playing in the background, I can stay mostly on-task and still keep abreast of what is going on in the world (and who is writing on my facebook wall, commenting on my blog, or emailing my personal account). 3) IRS.gov. I am going to let you – my beautiful readers – in on a dirty little secret. When somebody (a client, a friend, anyone) calls me and asks a tax question, I pretty much type my keywords into the Internal Revenue Service’s gnarly little search box. It isn’t the most intuitive index, but if you click around a bit you can pretty much find the answer to any tax code question. For a directory-type interface that ultimately leads to the same places, check out TaxTopics. 4) Lifehacker. The GTD oracle. When searching for new, innovative tips on how to be more productive, this is my jumping-off point. From here, I have discovered such gems as Zen Habits, WebWorkerDaily, and Micro Persuasion. 5) Number five is simply closing the web browser. If the window is open, it is way too tempting to say “I think I’ll just take a few minutes and check out site x.” Better to just block it all out. The best solution would be to turn the computer off altogether, but that’s a bit impractical. Time-Wasters: 1) StumbleUpon. Oh, come on. This service (especially with the Firefox add-on) was invented to get your ass fired. Clicking the little “stumble” button will take you to a random website based on your likes and dislikes and the recommendations of other StumbleUpon users. Addictive. 2) Curveball! I could play this game for hours. Simple. Calming. Impossible to resist. 3) Bundesdance!!! Look. I can’t explain it, okay? I just can’t stop playing with it. 4) NetVibes / Google Reader. “But, grammaticaster… you listed this as a ‘time-saver’… what gives?!!” You see, theoretically this would be an incredible time saver. Instead of browsing around to different web sites, I can see all updates from in one easily-navigable page. In theory, I should have only those most essential feeds on the front page… but guess what: in practice it has not worked out quite that way. Instead, alongside valuable headlines from Reuters and al.com, I also see live feeds from FailBlog and Paste Magazine. Not productive at all, really. 5) The social internet. Twitter. Facebook. The most recent photos at DeviantART. Friends’ blogs (see sidebar). Plain old e-mail (writing my buddies takes about an hour… I am a finicky self-editor). And last-but-not-least: THIS BLOG RIGHT HERE. It has become an obsession, folks. Thanks for all the encouragement. A) Fist things first. Benjamin Barber at The Nation has written a macro-economic masterpiece of an article which puts forward such delectable nuggets as:
Where, sir, have you been all my life? I want my readers (the volumes and volumes of you who are out there in the aether – I know you’re there… I can hear you breathing) to read his article and thus form a basis of understanding for every grammaticaster economy-themed post from here on out. Thank god for composers more eloquent than I. … B) Secondly… here, on the ground level, the economic crisis is hitting home at long last. I am getting human resource lessons from both sides of the divide – the fired and the firers. I now have two extremely close friends/relations who have been impacted negatively (let go by their employers) by the “economic crisis.” My significant other, conversely, works in employee communications for a company that just laid off 1200 professionals. What wondrous times we live in. These events seem to shore up the assessment I made last weekend: this downturn is, and is going to be, much worse than the impression we are getting from the media and the politicians. This is bad. This is bad, bad, bad. I am not saying it is time to run out and horde jugs of water, duct tape and ammunition, but it may be time to put a little extra effort into convincing your employers of how necessary you are to their organization. Meanwhile, I shall continue to launch the resumes of my loved ones into the ever-increasing, faster-flowing stream of job seekers. How bad is this going to get before it starts getting better? … C) Finally, on a base, selfish level, the economy is negatively influencing my sex life. That’s right. My spouse comes home depressed, dejected and demoralized from days full of ruining other peoples’ lives. The end result is that I get zero nookie. So, please, think of little Herman. He has done nothing to deserve this. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, audit season has begun. Today I was out in the middle of nowhere – which is located, surprisingly, about 45 minutes by car from downtown Birmingham. The school was seriously outdated. The library, where we set up, was the size of a regular classroom, and the shelves were around the perimeter of the room only. Also, this one school encompassed all grades, K-12. There were two separate buildings though, and we were stationed in the 7th-12th grade section. My first observation is that the level of a school district’s hick-ness is not necessarily a key indicator of how clean their bookkeeping is. The internal controls seemed to work well, especially compared to some of the other schools I’ve seen (some in much more affluent areas than this one). My conclusion: the accounting and secretarial staff were definitely more competent than I expected them to be, which means I need to check my pre-conceived assumptions at the door next time. Secondly, returning to a school setting has a not-unexpected tendency to take me back to my own schoolboy days – in this case my old junior high and high school days. Not my favorite era, but there were glimmers of joy. Mostly, though, I remember not fitting in very well. I am still uncomfortable in social situations, and I tend to be hyper-focused on what people think of me. So you can imagine how much worse I was back then, when I had no conception of any coping skills and no perspective on the importance of popularity, etcetera, etcetera. Well, nowadays, over a decade removed from the high school experience, I experience a weird mental transformation when I walk into one of these schools. I immediately become much more self-aware. If we are working in a space where students are coming and going (as they were today), I have a real need for them to think I’m cool. Retarded, huh? Thirdly… well, I have to remind myself not to ogle the girls. Old habits die hard. What can I say? |
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Copyright © 2008 - 2012 Douglas R. Scarborough - All Rights Reserved |
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