Plan for achievement for success as a bookkeeper or accountant 

Make a monthly plan and review it regularly. Reset your objectives as your weekly or daily achievements are met. Prioritizing tasks involves remaining flexible, completing important tasks then shifting new tasks to the important zone. This should be done for both personal and business goals. A yearly planner can also be set and reviewed against the achievement of progressive objectives.

Monitor your plan. Problems will always occur. Monitoring plans enable you to identify problems early and seek out solutions. Measure the progress towards your goals because what you can measure, you can control.

Why Flexibility is important in accounting 

Interruptions and changes will always intrude. A task plan does not require absolute and rigid adherence. Be sufficiently flexible to incorporate new things into the plan and eradicate those things that, for whatever reason, are no longer necessary, without panicking or becoming over-stressed. If you have to reassess the priorities, remember to consult with your colleagues—especially if it means that your output can affect their work too. Learn other aspects important to becoming a bookkeeper or accountant by studying an accounting Diploma - view details about the classes here. 

Efficiency versus effectiveness

Efficiency is the ratio of inputs to outputs—it measures the cost of producing a unit of product or a service within time specifications.

Effectiveness is a measure of the extent to which the product or service meets customers’ needs or expectations. It is quite possible to produce products/ services efficiently, but they might be ineffective, in that they do not meet the customer’s requirements. Thus effectiveness contains elements related to quality and standards of production.

You need to focus on both the function (efficiency) and the purpose (effectiveness) of your work. Many people spend their days in a frenzy of activity, but achieve very little because they are not concentrating on the right things. You can be extremely efficient but achieve very little.

Efficiency is necessary so that tasks are completed within time frames, but ensure that the tasks you are completing are relevant and are actually achieving quality results. Organize both work and time so that you focus on the purpose of your activities and make the function fit.

The objective of time management is to achieve results:

• concentrate on the achievement of objectives, not on being busy
• break large tasks down into smaller steps and check each step off your list as it is achieved, this way you can actually see what has been achieved
• each achievement motivates the next

To prioritize tasks, you could assess and allocate codes to the tasks in your daily to-do lists, weekly and monthly plans:

• A—determine what needs to be done immediately
• B—what needs to be done within a specific time frame, therefore must have time allocated
• C—what will contribute to your results but need not be done now or could be delegated to someone else
• D—what can be set aside altogether

You could use a chart like the one shown to assess each task against specified criteria.

Ask:

How to measure Urgency as an Accountant 

Identify tasks as urgent/ non-urgent—important/ non-important. Which tasks are vital and which do not actually need to be done at all. Work out what urgent means. Important activities are not necessarily urgent. Urgent tasks have short-term consequences, while important tasks are those with long-term, goal-related implications. Truly urgent activities are major crises or life and death emergencies which are fortunately not the norm.

Many supposedly urgent activities are unimportant and waste your time by preventing you from achieving worthwhile goals. The only activities that should be categorized as urgent are genuine crises, for example, a plant fire or major public relations or process failures (unexpected machinery breakdowns) which could seriously affect your business. The latter is also, to a large degree, indicative of poor organizational planning. Well, run organizations concentrate on completing important tasks and disallowing development of urgent tasks.

Management theorist Peter Drucker says that crisis management is actually the form of management preferred by most managers. ‘Case studies do not prepare future managers for reality. Their reality is a crisis—and it is the daily reality for anybody in an organisation. Then there is neither time nor information to study what happened ten years ago. Then the executive usually has ten minutes to respond.’

The irony is that actions taken prior to the crisis could have prevented the emergency in the first place. Reactive management is neither efficient nor effective. Complete tasks before they are perceived as urgent.

You should, therefore, consider prioritising tasks according to the matrix (adapted from Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , 1997) remembering that tasks allocated to the important quadrant are those tasks that you should spend the majority of your work time dealing with. Achievement of these tasks is directly goal related. They should not be superseded by unimportant tasks or left until they actually do become urgent.

Look at the matrix to work out where you spend most of your working time.

Time management/ priority setting matrix: