Busy season: The fourth time around

Busy season is officially underway and when I look at my calendar now, I only see the next 15 weeks as nothing but some form of hell. There are and will be many invigorating days where I know I will go to sleep at night thinking that somehow, someway, in my job I am doing something good for someone. But I know that at the end of it all, I am going to be exhausted from trying to remain so focused for such an extensive amount of time. For the next 15 weeks, each and every day on my calendar has a little pink box on it telling me where I'm supposed to be, what client I'm supposed to be working on. There are no blank days. Next month, if someone can get me a blank day, I would probably be willing to give up my left pinky toe in exchange. I mean that is a huge sacrifice- part of my body for a free day!? Well, ok, so I'm not exactly sure yet if that would be a deal. Ask me in a few weeks.

Up until this week, I've been very busy but it hasn't seemed that bad. Granted, I had to stop going to my class and I work on average from 7am to 9pm every day but it was tolerable. Until this weekend. I spent most of yesterday in the office and all day today working at home. And then I opened my calendar. That's when I saw all of the little pink boxes lined up, mocking me.

In busy season, we are trained to be "professional focusers." I don't really know that focusers is a word, much less a job description, but you get the point. Anything unrelated to work basically goes out the window. So far this year, I've still managed to hang out with my friends at least one time a weekend but that will dwindle down as deadlines start to get more prominent over the next few weeks. We will all lose a little bit of touch until around April when we start to feel more like we're on the downslide and we'll look at each other and say, "Damn. It's been a while." And then we'll move on from there as if we didn't just lose two months of our life to work. It's good to have friends who are in public accounting as well because there is a certain level of understanding already there about what we go through this time of year that we have to explain to our friends not in public accounting.

I am getting to be a veteran at this busy season gig. It's my fourth one- I spent two in tax, this is my second in audit. Audit busy seasons are longer- mine went through the end of May last year- but the hours we work are also drawn out over this period of time where tax people cram all these hours into a shorter amount of time. I have to say, I'm down with the audit side of things.

Now that I just sufficiently spent 20 minutes posting about work, I guess it's time to get back to work...