Okay, now we’re in the midst of our busy season and it’s utter mayhem, so let’s make it manageable.
When your busiest seasons hit, the instinct is usually to embrace the hustle with lots of coffee, little sleep, and overwork.
It’s no wonder we burn out – this type of work isn’t sustainable!
We can totally embrace the hustle – but if we want to keep from burning out, we need to be more strategic about it.
Welcome to Part 3 of the Guide where we’re talking manageable mayhem!
If you’re new to the Guide, start here! The Busy Season Survival Guide is a cumulation of a decade of lessons I’ve learned about managing busy season burnout while trying to stay connected to creativity. This Guide is meant to support you in staying resilient and creative, even with a demanding day job!
Before we get into it, you’ll notice that self-care activities are missing from the list below. Don’t worry, they are important – so much so that they’ve got their own section! Part 4 is about Sustainable Self-Care.
With so much outside of our control, the goal here isn’t to “manage the mayhem” per se, but to manage how we navigate it. We’ll aim to maintain stamina and embrace the deep work without fanning the flames of burnout by:
- Adopting mindsets that help everything feel more manageable
- Managing our environment as much as possible
- Engaging in self-management
- Doing what you can to manage your workflow
Ready for more? Let’s go!
Mindsets That Help
Overwhelm and burnout stem largely from a lack of control and feeling too stretched. It’s amazing how a simple shift in perspective can help you regain your center and sense of control!
An effective mindset can also improve your energy levels, clarity of decision-making, and leadership.
1. You do not need to overwork to be productive.
It is not the number of hours you put in that defines how productive you are.
Yes, there’s a lot to do. Yes, the deadlines are fast approaching. But five hours of work done in a burnt out state won’t hold an (ironic) candle to three hours of work done in a clear, focused, and energized state.
Especially when you factor in time spent revisiting the work and correcting mistakes!
As the saying goes, you need to put your own oxygen mask on first before you can help others crush through deadlines. Be mindful that with an increase in working hours comes a necessary increase in care and attention for your own wellbeing.
This mindset will help you avoid any unnecessary, extraneous overwork or use overworking as a default strategy.
2. Put it all into perspective.
In Part 2 we talked about keeping your “path and purpose” top of mind. Now is the time to lean into it!
Put it in your phone as a daily reminder, paste it to your wall, etc. If that doesn’t speak to you, then simply remember that the season is temporary, and it will eventually come to an end.
A time for rest and recovery is on its way.
This mindset will help you zoom out and feel a bit more at peace with the chaotic process because you’ll be able to see contextually where it fits into your life (or year), and when it ends.
3. Lean Into Comradery
Especially if you have a team going through the same thing together, but even if you don’t, the grind feels so much more manageable when it’s shared.
Look for opportunities to connect.
If you’re flying solo, do you know anyone else who is preparing for the same event, or hustling on their own projects at the same time? A shared office space or a work-along Zoom meeting can give you the motivation you need to push through energetically. If you can’t think of anyone, do you have a good friend who can be your cheerleader?
That’s one of the great things about tax seasons. The entire firm (or tax team) is hustling to meet overtime requirements together. It’s energizing to feel like you’re a part of the team working hard toward a common goal.
If you’re lucky to have great coworkers like I do, sharing the load can be a bright spot in an otherwise difficult busy season!
This mindset will help you feel connected, capable, and like you’re working towards something that is bigger than the immediate pressure you’re feeling (you are)!
Managing Your Environment
When you’re in the midst of your busy season, you want to “set yourself up for success”. Accomplish this in the literal sense by paying attention to your environment!
You want your environment to support your energy levels, your work flow, and your physical health as much as possible.
1. Make Small, Practical Changes
Busy season is chaotic and stressful, so wherever your work space is, it can help to make it relatively peaceful and minimalistic:
- Clear your desk as much as possible. Utilize your drawers, digitize extraneous papers, hide wires, and give yourself some breathing room. Minimizing visual distraction will help foster a sense of calm and can improve focus.
- Use physical documents to prioritize workflow. If you can’t avoid having physical documents on your desk, you can take advantage by using them as a visual prioritization system! For example, you can organize your files from most urgent to least urgent. You’ll be able to visualize your current capacity, and you’ll automatically know what to reach for next.
- Try ambient sound. Personally, I like to work with lo-fi music. I find it helps me concentrate and get “into flow” better than silence does (since silence is so easily broken)!
- Make ergonomic adjustments. Things like keeping your screen, desk, and chair at the right height, trying a standing desk, and using an ergonomic keyboard and mouse can help to minimize the physical toll that working long hours takes on the body.
- Ensure your space is well-lit. This can help you avoid physical issues like eye-strain, but can also help to improve your energy levels.
- Add a plant. There are plants that do well in low-light. There are also little grow-lights that you can plug into your computer’s USB and clip to your plant pot! Adding a little greenery to your workspace can be calming and uplifting.
- Keep your bullet journal or notepad open. When there’s a lot to do and a lot of information coming at you, I find “rapid logging” really helpful. It helps you to capture thoughts, tasks, and ideas as they arise without having to hold mental space for them while you’re working on other things. Check out the “rapid logging” section of this bullet journaling primer for more.
2. Reframe Your In-Office Work Experience
If your busy season involves heading wearily into the office every day and it’s filling you with dread, see if you can re-frame your in-office experience:
- Lean into comradery and enjoy the togetherness.
- Make your commute more enjoyable with an engaging podcast, carpool karaoke session, or a voice memo brainstorming session for your next creative project.
- Embrace “learning through osmosis”, or appreciate how your physical presence can give you an advantage in your career.
We expand on these ideas in this post about happily heading back to the office.
This kind of re-frame gives your presence at the office some purpose and focuses your attention on what makes it worth it to you.
3. Enhance Your Work-From-Home Experience
It’s tougher to stay ahead of burnout when you’re working from home. Not only is it isolating, but the barriers between work and life are blurred and constantly competing.
To bring back a sense of togetherness, can you and a colleague hop on a Teams call and work together virtually?
You can also give yourself a boost by making some improvements to your workflow and work space:
- See if you can get creative with your work hours and energy levels (within the boundaries of your employment agreement of course!)
- Create more separation between your work area and your living area
- Develop a “shut down” routine to create a definitive end to your work day
- Improve your workspace ergonomics
- Manage distractions so that you can work deeply
We expand more on these concepts in the post about working from home (after building a career in-office).
Self-Management
You know how people always say “set healthy boundaries”? Self-management involves setting healthy boundaries with yourself.
Here are three ways to do that:
1. Pace Yourself
“Burnout is real, so pace yourself” was one of the first tips I had written for myself in my own Busy Season Survival Guide many years ago. Back then I didn’t believe “burnout” was a thing, and so I’d just hurl myself into busy season full-force without thinking about pacing.
Much like running a long-distance race, there’s a time to cruise and a time to hit the throttle. It takes some finessing, but you need to understand two things:
- Your own pacing – what is sustainable for you and for how long, and
- The pacing of your deadlines.
How does this look? Well, say a comfortable “busy season” pace is a 45 hour work week, but I know I can crush through two 55 hour weeks in a row before I need a recovery period. (The big firm accountants are laughing at me, what a lightweight!) Understanding this, I can be strategic about when to place my lighter and heavier weeks to help the team meet deadlines effectively.
2. Focus on Your Own Workload (and Don’t Compare)
Help, I’m surrounded by public accountants! Not just my coworkers, but my immediate family and best bud… And they are ambitious, incredibly hard working accountants to say the least.
So take it from me – some of us are built to crush through high volumes of work and long hours. It aligns with our personal energy, interests, skillsets and ambitions. Others of us are… Not built the same way. (That would be me!)
If you’re a little more like me, don’t waste energy trying to match your peers stride-for-stride. Avoid comparison and work within your personal capacity. You can do this by understanding the internal and external factors that contribute most to burnout for you, and manage them. (We talk a bit more about those factors in Part 1 of the Guide).
3. Not Every Deadline is an Emergency
On every employee evaluation checklist is something like “meets the intensity of the situation”. I totally get this – if there’s an important deadline coming up, we don’t want to see the team shuffling in late and sipping coffee with their feet up while we’re trying to meet it.
Who is determining the intensity of the situation, though? Is it rational? This is a delicate dance, because if it’s your employer, they are literally the boss of you, and you sort-of have to take their word for it.
Sort-of.
Everyone is human, and even the most seasoned leaders can have an exaggerated perception of the appropriate level of intensity.
And even if intensity is required, there are very few literal emergencies in corporate environments. Treating deadlines like emergencies (and pushing yourself to a breaking point) creates needless stress and anxiety.
Managing Your Workflow
In this last section we’ll cover three things you can do to manage your workflow effectively to avoid overwork and unnecessary stress:
1. Under Promise, Over Deliver
This is a classic for a reason! The advice applies any time of year, but especially when you’re trying to stay ahead of burnout. Why back yourself into a corner when you don’t have to? Creating a challenging deadline for yourself just creates unnecessary stress.
Learn how to estimate how long projects will take. Make a habit of rounding up. Get good at offering a comfortable deadline or amount of work to your client or employer.
If your comfortable deadline isn’t soon enough for them, try collaborating to see what you can delegate off your plate so that you can focus on getting the project done sooner. (If you don’t have colleagues to delegate work to, are there other non-work tasks that you can get help with?)
At worst, you’ll be able to do what you promised without undue stress. At best, you’ll be able to deliver on either more than expected, or faster than expected, which always leaves a positive impression (and buys you some goodwill for the future).
2. Say No, Early Enough
We’ve all learned that “no” is a full sentence, yes?
Saying “no” is easier to do when you’re already struggling to stay afloat. The challenge is to say “no” before you start treading water.
To do that, we go back once again to understanding your personal brand of burnout. Build awareness of your energy levels, and cross-check them with the amount of time and energy it will take to manage your existing workload.
Hint: I’m not just talking about your employed workload, but your day-to-day workload, including personal tasks that need to be taken care of.
Then just don’t take on more than that.
I meant that in jest, but that really is the task – to know your limit and work within it.
3. No Multitasking
I can’t do it.
I think I can, and it feels like I can, but if I really pay attention, I’ll notice that a session of “multitasking” leaves me feeling confused and overwhelmed. The mind really can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, and it is not that great at flipping back-and-forth.
So, focus. You’ll be far more efficient, and you’ll feel far more productive and in control.
Compartmentalize the many things begging for your attention by:
- Reducing the quantity by delegating
- Lean heavily on task-lists and calendars, rather than trying to hold everything in your brain
- Dedicate your full focus to one thing for a set period of time before switching to the next thing (the Pomodoro technique is a common way to do this)
- Set quiet hours, reduce your notifications, or make it so that you have to check for emails or messages intentionally
This is how I get through my busiest periods of work. I would love to hear your tips below!
Of course there’s one very important aspect that we’ll cover in Part 4. The fuel that keeps you running, your inner shield to defend from the flames of burnout: sustainable self-care.
