Task management tips for accountants

Six task management best practices accountants around the world use to ensure no deadline is missed & productivity levels are at their max.

An accountant's day-to-day is basically managing a plethora of tasks: from to-do items to email replies, job management, and checklists.

Is there a science to task management? A way to ensure you never miss a deadline and your productivity levels are at their max?

Here are six best practices from accountants around the world.

1. Keep tasks detailed and granular

People are often too generic in their creation of tasks. For example, a direction such as "call back Jan" leaves more questions than answers. Why are you calling her? What is the objective? Is there a time you need to call her by?

Make it possible to be able to get to any future task and get it done in one go. Instead of the general example before, direction like "Phone Jan at [phone number] before [date/time] and discuss/get details on [specific topic]."

This way when you get a chance to do it, you quickly know what it is, what to do, can take action, and be able to track its completion.

Being detailed here makes your life easier and makes doing tasks more fluid.

The second half of this tip is to be as granular as possible. The bigger in scope a task is, the more difficult it is to accomplish. This means you're less likely to be able to complete it in one go (and it ends up lingering in your to-do list.) Breaking things up in specific one-action sentences will allow you to get larger tasks done in less time and with less angst.

For example, "Negotiate with Jan to complete her engagement" is a task that could take days or weeks to accomplish. As a task on a to-do list, it's useless. However, if you break it up into smaller to-do items like:

Get paperwork together
Write down Jan's business needs
Prep the proposal for sending
Request proposal feedback
Finalise engagement

Then it becomes manageable and its progress can easily be tracked.

2. Re-prioritize each morning & prepare for the next day

If you want to complete everything that you plan to each day, then you have to be disciplined in the prioritization of what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, and how you're going to get it done.

Each morning, while you have your coffee and go through your unread emails, you should be re-prioritizing your work for the day. Even if you need to get more than 10 tasks done, try to choose and write down the 3-5 things that you simply must accomplish at all costs that day.