Tax Season #4

It's hard to believe that this is already my fourth tax season.  It's been a long way.  From the first work term, when I had absolutely no idea what things go into a tax return.  To this year, I worked on some of the biggest and most complicated clients.

This year, it's been very tiring, for many reasons.

As work started to get busy in January, things in my personal life took a turn and my workload increased a lot.  I know I was expected to put in the hours at work, but I also had things at home to tend to.  The truth is, if I don't take care of things, nobody will.

In March and April, as the personal tax work started coming, I was thrown out into the field.  Unfortunately for me, the field work that I have picked up over the years all come at this time of the year.  It's been stressful to know that while I'm out at clients during the day, a whole different set of work is piling up on my desk in the office.  (This is a real problem in this office.  One boss assigns me to one thing, and another is giving more other stuff.  Neither is aware of what I already have.)

I've known that the office has a lot of personal tax work, and I've known that I do a lot of tax returns over these few months.  Out of curiosity, this year, I kept track:

127 tax returns.  (Or actually more, because some clients have more than one return.)

For the last little while, some people at work have been talking about how many hours they've put in and how many they want to put in.  They are satisfied and think they've done enough if they hit a certain number of hours.  To me, I've never looked at it that way.  To me, I'm a member of this firm, there's a job to be done, so I'm going to work and make sure it gets done.  In fact, it always seems horrible to me that on the last day most of us are hanging around chatting and chilling while the more senior people are frantically trying to finish their work and the admin people are crazily printing and delivering packages.  Unfortunately, there's not much I can do to help them.

Out of curiosity, I also looked at my hours and compared them with previous years.  To put things into perspective, an average work week is 35 hours and so an average month is about 140-150 hours.  Interestingly, in the past three years, I put in 244 hours during the month of April.  This year:

272 hours.

The last time I had a day off was Apr 7th.  Since then it's been about 12-13 hours on weekdays and 9-10 hours on weekends.  The craziest part was that I did not expect to be working the Sunday before the deadline, but that ended up being the longest Sunday work day ever.

So 127 tax returns and 272 hours later, I think I've earned my day off.