An EA I talked to, color codes her calendar every Sunday night. Every
block planned, every hour accounted for. She follows it like scripture.
And she still missed a deadline on a resolution case last spring,
because she had scheduled the financial statement review, the part of
the job that actually requires her full brain, for 4pm on a Thursday. By
4pm on a Thursday she has nothing left. She read the numbers, missed
what mattered, and did not catch it until the client called upset three
weeks later.
Her calendar was not the problem. Her calendar treated every hour
like it was interchangeable, and no hour in your day is interchangeable
with any other hour.
Here is the answer up front. Time management built around tasks alone
fails, because it assumes you have the same capacity for judgment at 9am
and at 4pm, and you do not. The fix is mapping when you actually have
the mental sharpness for real decisions, protecting those hours for
exactly that kind of work, and moving everything else, deliberately, to
the hours where your judgment is already spent anyway.
The Two-Week Audit
That Tells You the Truth
You cannot protect hours you have not identified. For two weeks,
track what you are doing in fifteen-minute blocks, and mark each one
twice. Once for what it was. Once for how you felt doing it: sharp, or
foggy.
Do this during a normal working stretch, not a slow week in July when
everything feels manageable. The pattern only shows up under real
load.
By day four, you will already see it. Most people find one
predictable stretch, often mid-morning, where their thinking is
genuinely clear, and one predictable stretch, often right after lunch or
late in the afternoon, where it is not. Read that again, because it is
the whole insight: the fog is predictable. It happens at roughly the
same time every day. Which means you can plan around it instead of being
surprised by it.
What Tax Pros Usually Find
The pattern is remarkably consistent across the practitioners I have
watched run this exercise.
Strategy work, the kind that decides an offer structure or an appeals
argument, only lands well in the sharp window. Attempted outside it, it
takes twice as long and the quality drops even when the person does not
notice the drop themselves.
Document chasing, scheduling, and returning routine calls score the
same regardless of what time you do them. They are mechanical. They do
not care whether you are sharp or foggy.
Client calls that involve delivering bad news or handling an upset
person are worse in the foggy window, every time, because you have less
patience left to draw on.
The mistake almost everyone makes is putting the mechanical work in
the morning, because it feels productive to clear the inbox first, and
saving the hard thinking for whenever there is time left. That is
exactly backward. It burns your best hours on work that did not need
them.
The Rule:
Protect Judgment Hours Like a Court Date
Once you know your sharp window, block it, and treat that block the
way you would treat an actual court appearance. Nothing bumps it. Not a
client who “just needs two minutes.” Not the return that feels urgent
because it is sitting in front of you. A return that has waited three
days can wait until 1pm. A collections strategy call cannot be done well
at any hour except the one where your brain is actually available for
it.
I know what you are thinking. But Dan, everything feels urgent during
tax season. It does. That is exactly why the block has to be a rule and not
a mood. If it is negotiable in the moment, it will get negotiated away
every single time, because the loudest thing in front of you always wins
the moment you leave the door open.
Where the Low-Energy
Hours Actually Belong
The foggy stretch is not wasted time. It is exactly the right time
for work that does not need your full judgment. Scanning. Filing.
Scheduling. Portal resets. Return assembly. Routine calls. Invoicing.
None of that suffers from being done at 3pm instead of 9am, and all of
it feels lighter when you are not fighting your own depleted brain to do
it. It is even easier for some of these tasks if you use a checklist so you don’t skip steps in your fog.
This is also where the earlier document-chase and notice-triage
habits fit best, whether you have built a tool to help with them or you
are still doing it by hand. Low-stakes, repetitive, mechanical work
belongs in the hours where deep thinking was never going to happen
anyway.
The Week Doesn’t Balance
Itself
A week built around energy has a shape, and the shape has to be
decided on purpose, not discovered by accident on a Wednesday. One
protected block, most days, for the work that actually requires you. The
rest of the day filled with everything else, sequenced so the hardest
thinking happens when you have the most to give it. Consults and
client-facing calls stacked into a smaller number of dedicated windows
rather than scattered across the whole day, so the constant context
switching does not eat the sharp hours by attrition.
This is not about working fewer hours, though it often ends up that
way. It is about spending the hours you already have on the right work
at the right time, instead of spending your best hours on your smallest
tasks because they happened to land first.
What This Costs You If You
Skip It
You already know the version of the week where this goes wrong.
Eleven hours at the desk and you cannot name one thing you actually
decided well. Dinner missed for admin work that would have taken twenty
minutes if you had done it at 3pm instead of fighting it at 9am while
your brain was still capable of the case that actually needed it. The
exhaustion is not from the hours. It is from spending your sharpest
thinking on your least important work, over and over, without ever
noticing the trade you were making.
Run the two-week audit. It costs you nothing but honesty, and it
tells you exactly where your week is currently leaking.
Send me an email and tell me what your own pattern looks like once you track it.
I read every one, and most of you will find the same shape everyone else
finds, which tells you the fix is not a personal failing. It is a
structural one, and structure is fixable.
I am on a mission to improve the lives of licensed tax professionals
by showing them there are more options in IRS representation than they
were ever taught, so they can raise client quality, grow revenue, cut
the hours, and get their life back. A week built around your actual
energy, instead of an idealized version of your day, is one of the
fastest ways to get real hours of your life back without changing a
single client relationship.
If posts like this one belong in your inbox, drop your email below. One post a week. No fluff.
Here’s to working smarter, not harder!
And a brighter future for your tax practice!
If you want to know more consider joining the Tax Resolution Academy® and earn your Certified Taxpayer Representative™ (CTR™) certification.
I hope this helps.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us.
Have a GREAT day,
With Love,
Dan
Dan Henn, CPA, CTR™
Co-Founder, Tax Resolution Academy®
Managing Member
Tax Pro Academy, LLC
P.S. Want to learn more about the Tax Resolution Academy®, go to https://members.taxresolutionacademy.com.
P.P.S. Check out our CPE classes here! Click the link to Follow our page and you will be notified when we release new classes.
