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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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I'd second the comment about exercise, as well as trying to get more activity throughout the day. Some short fairly intense bursts of activity every hour or two can be helpful in keeping energy levels high (things like bodyweight exercises and jump rope).
It can be difficult to start on an exercise push when you're feeling exhausted, but it's helpful to remember that by and large if you want your body to generate energy you need to use energy, otherwise it defaults to rest and digest mode.
Ensuring you're eating ok and getting enough sleep is also pretty key in my experience.
Lastly I'd add that it's ok to spend some time staring at the wall, if that's what you need at the moment. At least for me, part of burnout comes from that sense of pushing against what I feel like I should be doing, and it can be helpful to acknowledge that I need a period of recuperation and not to beat myself up about it.
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Try some physical exercise - lifting heavy objects over and over. I assume you have a holiday shutdown coming and will have enough time to get into a routine. Your physical situation will improve your mental situation. Busy season sucks and there is still a ways to go. Good luck.
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You can try a meditation retreat if you can take time off. Consumption of media isn't leisure, I take concerta and have always had issues psychologically, this stuff helped me out a lot. You can also take up self therapy in the form of Gendlins focusing, there are people you can do a weekly session with. This form of therapy is not verbal where you talk for hours about your problems and is extremely effective.
Jordan Peterson who's a very competent clinical psychologist recommended quarterly vacations as they help stave burnout in the long term. I wish you well, I suffered from stress back in 2019 as I'd spent years in cram schools and have mild stomach issues because of stress accumulated at that time. Meditation and Concerta have halped a lot so far.
There is a motte user who helps people out with similar issues but I'm not sure if it's right to mention this as it might come off as me shilling something for someone. I wish you the best.
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