Photo by Henry Hustava on Unsplash
How do you survive during the audit busy season in a Big 4 firm—there’s only one ultimate rule. Stay alive.
When you wake, stomp on the dismiss button. Don’t snooze. Forget the bed, the cushion, or the cold. Brew yourself some coffee. Dip into your favorite mug while you open your laptop and scroll through last night’s emails.
No matter how hard the temptation, do not attempt to respond to all. If it will take longer than two minutes to solve, park the item in your to-do-list.
Scrap the to-do-list. It never works.
Focus on the three absolute must of your day. Eat. Work. Sleep. You only have twenty-four-hours. Make the best out of it.
Anticipate the bomb.
While you grab a bite from a bagel, a homemade sandwich, or last night’s left-over, anticipate the first bomb of the morning. A sudden acceleration in the reporting deadline? An irate client? A messy control that’s not going to get fixed? Anything can stop your heartbeat.
Don’t let the bomb explode. Keep ahold of yourself. Inhale. Exhale. Then, put on your best-poker-face as you meet your colleagues on Zoom or Teams.
Listen to the general.
Remember that night two years ago when you were all camped in a room, pounding on your laptops in between quick bites of pizza and slurps of Starbucks? You were always trying to escape that.
Ah, those were the better days.
Now, all you have is the screen between you and your favorite team and suddenly, you’re all craving to be in the same room again. But this is no time for nostalgia. Discuss whatever you must.
Listen to the general as he/she rallies the troops. You’re a foot soldier for now. It’s best to do what you’re told.
Stock on bullets.
Arm yourself to the teeth. And when I say arm, you do this. Finish that sandwich, never skip a meal. Hydrate yourself. Water brings oxygen to your brain. And don’t forget to breathe.
Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels
Follow the map.
Use the tracker or whatever fancy name you call that excel file uploaded in Teams where you can all go in and simultaneously flex your completed working papers for everyone to see. That map is holy. It tells you whether you’re bound to remain a foot soldier or will get promoted to a general someday.
Slay the enemies.
Open last night’s working paper that invaded your dreams. Live the nightmare. You wouldn’t—you couldn’t—stop until you reconcile those figures to the last cent. Or else, die trying.
You must battle mañana. Remove the phone if you must. Blast on some Spotify playlist that will keep you firing.
Forget the Netflix series that you were watching last weekend, forget your friends’ comments on your latest posts/rants, forget reading about the news or opening your personal emails for nothing does more harm to your focus than a recruiter email inviting you to submit your latest resume to a job post.
Carry the wounded.
You’ll always have that faint-hearted colleague who has a low tolerance for the blood. Because metaphorically speaking, you’ll spill blood and sweat as you clack on your keyboard in a race against time.
Know when your colleague is dying. Carry him/her if you must and take on some of the weight. That’s a drag for sure. But you’ll save a life.
Hold your anger, when another one of your colleagues, a foot soldier of lesser or equal respect as you, cannot work as fast as you could. Every brain speed is different. You must have patience.
Defend your territory.
Talk to your friends, your family, your significant other, if you’re feeling blood-drained yourself.
Don’t let the depressing state of the battlefield ruin your brain and heart. Protect yourself from desolation through yoga or meditation. Even five minutes of Headspace can pull you out of the dark hole.
Take a walk. Soak the sun or whatever substitute there is to warm up your heart.
If you are captured, accept a beating.
Heed your general (the boss or someone of a higher rank) who pops in with a nice “how-do-you-do” through Skype. Last year, too, you were always playing a game of hide-and-seek with him. You used to greet each other politely in the lobby before you have to volley back-and-forth questions on the audit’s status.
Now, your boss harangues you with an update on the impairment testing that you were so unlucky to end up with. You feel pathetic as you fail the quiz—a rat-tat-tat of questions designed to test your understanding of the IFRS.
But worry not. You’re learning. You’ll get past the humiliation and remember it as one of the proudest moments of your career when you got beaten up but learned.
Photo by Devanath on Pixabay
Keep firing.
Keep smiling as you get through five more Zoom meetings before twelve. (12:00 AM, that is.)
At midnight, your Excel stops responding. You’re screwed.
Remember to breathe. Remember your Headspace sessions. Remember that it’s not a matter of life-and-death. Or maybe it is. But only if you treat it that way.
Your Excel is a wise counsel. It’s telling you to stop working because your body needs sleep if you are to live for another day.
So stop if you must. Give in to the call of rest. Your back hurts, your fingers are sore, your eyes strained to the point of bulging out of their sockets. You shouldn’t have been working until midnight in the first place.
But that’s the busy season, you say.
You live to die for another day.
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.” -Mary Anne Radmacher
