I'm risking some fuzzy-headedness here obviously, so hopefully it won't backfire on me. But I think I can relax responsibly, and it might help with the overall motivation problem of taxes!
I don't know why I always end up doing my taxes the night before Tax Day. I even started getting organized this year back in January -- and thank heavens I did, because I got a lot of the major stuff done. But then I got distracted with new clients and an increased workload, and finally this past weekend started working on it again. It may be a late night tonight, as usual for me on Tax Eve.
There's one other thing I did differently this year that should help, though: I stayed a little more caught up with expense reporting. I still had to catch up with income reporting, and now I'm going through all my receipts to make sure I didn't miss any expenses as I have in the last-minute scramble in previous years. But it's an improvement, at least, and I have hope that I can do even better this year.
So what changed? I started scheduling a "financials day" each week, usually on Mondays. Mondays is when I invoice a couple of my weekly clients, too, so it just made sense to catalog expense receipts, look at my budget, and pay bills on Mondays too. This year I'm going to add income reporting to Mondays so that I don't have to catch up on that at the end of the year, and I'm going to be better about making sure receipts and emails don't slip by me (my fear of missing things is what's taking so long this year -- I've caught things that I missed in previous years, primarily because I've been so poorly organized at tax time).
Here's hoping tonight is not too bad -- and that next year is even better! Cheers!
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