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Trying to manage end-of-year job burnout at the moment.
I'm pretty exhausted and can barely even bring myself to competently write this comment, let alone work on clients' returns. I've been making an oddly large amount of stupid errors recently, which isn't really common for me; I'm generally known for having a fairly high quality of work, and often catch other people's mistakes rather than the other way around. My job has a very production-line quality to it; there is always another job, and the goal is to get the greatest amount of client work done with a high accuracy and in the shortest amount of time.
This failure to focus is... quite bad, considering that my job is one that requires a pretty large amount of sustained concentration - for every client I handle, I receive on average like forty different financial docs, each containing disparate pieces of info about their financial situation. I get provided with a gigantic corpus of tax legislation and accounting best practices (the former, especially, can get indecipherably complex) and have to identify which laws and guidelines to apply. There’s a lot of info missing often, and the gaps necessarily have to be filled in with some assumptions. My job is to receive incomplete and poorly arranged info from the client, decipher how to treat it based on a knotty, vague, conflicting tax code, and transform it into something comprehensible. When you're burned out, this appears almost insurmountable, paralysing to the extreme, and doing it quickly doesn't seem possible.
That level of concentration is really hard to maintain day after day for a sustained period of time; the job is monotonous and taxing at the same time (as much work in such fields is, to be fair). This funk has been slowly settling in throughout the entire year, but it's begun to really hit me after rushing out a bunch of urgent client work last week, and I've gotten into a pretty big slump. Even after work I can barely focus on anything I care about, and it feels almost like my brain is buffering whenever I try to concentrate at all. I find myself staring passively at my screen a lot, I've done that multiple times now writing this embarrassingly short comment.
This fucking sucks. Any advice for how to force your brain to hard reset over Christmas break? I'd very much like this feeling not to carry on to the new year, I don't think a whole year of running on fumes would be particularly healthy.
Speaking with some experience in your situation...the only reason you should be doing tax compliance in your career is if you own the practice and have your own hands on the levers of workload. I started having your exact experience just a couple years into my career. I hit the eject button and got into a different area of accounting.
If you can't do the same I don't have any advice for you, friend. Everyone who stays long enough has it take over their lives (and marriages).
Reading between the lines (and I may be wrong here), based on what sounds like a high volume of returns, you might even be doing multi-state tax compliance for state & local income and franchise tax from within a public accounting firm. If you're really doing this...man. Accountants are the janitors of the white collar world, and right now, you're the janitor's janitor, unclogging shitty toilets with your bare hands for a pittance. I can't be sure this is what you're doing, so I'd be happy to be wrong.
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