Staying Motivated
Volume 12, Number 12
Issue 560
One of the things that I am blessed with is that I don’t suffer from an ability to stay motivated. Perhaps it’s being obsessive to keep promises about meeting deadlines and goals--the old “under-promise and over-perform” strategy--or perhaps it’s my unwavering desire to deliver a great product on-time and at a reasonable fee. One of the ways that I do this is that I know what motivates me to exceed goals and that’s getting the work done and simply moving to the next piece of work.
The cornerstone of any business philosophy should always be impassioned customer service delivered by an entrepreneur who loves what they do. This fit’s nicely into my zeal to work as hard as humanly possible.
During busy season a lot of people become curious about how I can keep 100 hour work-weeks (including having my office physically open 78 hours per week) and produce 1,100 to 1,200 tax returns while at the same time having a commensurate number of meetings to receive the information to do the work. My only answer is that I do it because I literally love the entire process of customer service towards an agreed-upon goal and I combine it with strategies to get tasks compartmentalized into three categories of “work to be done.”
I love compartmentalizing things. It’s sort of in my nature. I am not a “spread” person; I am a “pile” person. I love placing things into piles and attacking one pile at a time until there are no more piles left. I immediately sort all incoming work into three major categories: 1) projects that are missing information and cannot be started until all items arrive; 2) small projects and 3) large projects.
I don’t start a project until my judgment tells me that everything’s complete. In this case, my judgment is actually finely-honed procrastination. I’ve found that under a cost:benefit scenario that it is counterproductive to start work then stop and then stop again while information dribbles in. I never have handled the dribble situations very well. It causes mistakes and it causes misunderstandings. Goals cannot be focused on until all information is received. So I detail what’s missing and then I set the project aside. Once the missing information arrives, then I sort into the “small project” or “large project” category.
“Small projects” are what captures my fire, passion and enthusiasm. I think that I place 98% of all tax returns and projects into this category. That’s how I can be so obsessive about fast-turnaround and getting large volumes of work done. I have a rule that all small projects are done immediately and never procrastinated about. I start work immediately and do them immediately. I have two benchmarks about small projects. 1) Every small project that I have must be done by Thursday of each week. In other words, I must be caught-up by when I stop on Thursday. 2) I must also be caught up by when I stop work on Sunday night (for the newly arrived small projects that come in after Thursday). The thing about this category is that I immediately do every small project that I have so I can always have a break to stop and savor the satisfaction of being caught-up.
The feeling of being “caught-up” is one that I absolutely savor. I often give the advice to entrepreneurs to budget for this goal in time management at whatever the cost. This is something that is worth the cost:benefit. Do whatever is necessary at certain times to have the feeling of being caught-up, even if it is only for a brief time. The feeling of “being caught-up” is the ultimate motivational tool to get you to complete projects and enjoy success.
The last category is the “large project” category--huge complex tax returns, financial statement generation, “box” people. When I place an incoming project into this category, it’s only temporary. What motivates me to attack “large projects” is finding a way to break large projects into multiple small projects and then reclassify them into the other two categories of work--“projects missing information” and “small projects.” To me, this last category--large projects--is emptied several times a week. There are no large projects--only the other two (“missing information” and “small”). By having this attitude, I never get behind or feel completely overwhelmed. I think that’s where so many good professionals fail in their work--they become overwhelmed in how to get the large projects finished.
For me, there are no large projects--only ones that I can’t start yet because of missing information and ones that will always be done either by Thursday or Sunday.
David B. Robinson, CPA
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