Top 5 Skills of Accounting Professionals Today: #4

Number 4 is another what I would call “technical skill” or “hard skill” that is entirely learnable. This one straddles the line between a soft skill and a hard skill because if you already have the personality for it, it is so much easier. But if you don’t have borderline OCD or full blown OCD like some of us, fear not, this is a skill you can learn! Here’s number 4!

Organization Skills

This might seem like a brainer but its actually a really hard skill to master. Even for me. The one thing I would recommend for any one who is starting to build up this skill though, is that it is a skill that really is built one good habit at a time. You cannot become organized over time. It is hundreds of thousands of habits and tiny things that you do each day that makes you organized. If this is something that you can prioritize, it can hugely benefit you, in both your work and your personal life.

Here are some steps that I’ve learned over the years if you want to get better.

1. Plan your attack.
   • Sit down and think about your life. What are the areas that you’d like to improve? Have you received some recent feedback from your manager that can help direct you? Are you bad at balancing your priorities? Do you show up late to meetings or appointments often? Are you often unable to find files or folders of things that people have sent you before? If you said yes to any of those things, that might be a good place to start.
   • Next, commit yourself to learning about organization and building good habits over the next 3 months. Spend at least 15-30 minutes each day absorbing and applying the skills that you’ve learned. You are not going to improve automatically after day 1. A great software is not going to solve all your problems. You have to be ready to put in the time and force yourself to rebuild your habits from the ground up.
2. Start small and set small goals.
   • Identify some key areas that you want to start to tackle. Don’t pick your whole life obviously! Choose a couple of things. Let’s say you are focused on your work, and you know some areas that you would like to improve are 1) Keeping yourself organized throughout the day 2) Maintaining and filing notes from meetings 3) Stay on top of your emails.
   • Pick 1 of these 3.
   • Now look up some strategies that you could use to help yourself become better.
   • Set some goals for yourself over the next few weeks. You can employ 1 new skill to put to use for a couple of days until it becomes natural.
3. Test and Refine.
   • Understand that a new tool/skill/habit is going to feel uncomfortable for a few days until you get used to it. You have to give it time to see if it’s going to work for you. Obviously, not all new skills are going to work for you. And there are a lot of different solutions out there that can solve one problem so there really is no one size fits all. Pick a couple that will solve 1 problem. Try them all for a few days, see which one feels the most natural.
   • For example, I want to become better at taking meeting notes. The majority of my meetings are on Zoom so I’ve selected a few solutions.
     • New habit – Take digital notes during my meetings.
     • Software solution – Install a third party AI meeting recorder that will send me a transcript and notes from my meetings.
     • Delegate – Assign someone on the call to take notes and send it out to the group after.
   • When I started the testing phase I realized that not all my meetings were made the same. Depending on the type of meeting (1:1, external partners, internal partners) I would have to switch my solution. I quickly realized this would be a non starter for me. I needed to have 1 solution that could be applied to all my meetings.
   • Delegating would work for big group meetings but it was still not what I needed because someone else could miss key points that I found important to note. I tried using the third party AI recorder but the AI was not smart enough to identify what was important vs not important and could not assign any context. The transcript it sent was sometimes wrong or could not identify the words that we were saying. I think this probably would improve over time as the technology gets better. I’m still worried about the security aspect (as is my IT team).
   • It really was back to basics for me. Sometimes the most obvious solution is the best one. I started opening up my notes app every time I had a meeting. I would name the notes the same as the meeting invite, note the date and the attendees. Some meetings I would end up with zero notes, sometimes not very good notes and sometimes notes that didn’t make sense when I read them a week later. Once I got into the habit of opening my notes app and labeling it correctly for each meeting, I then had to learn how to take better and more effective notes. I had to learn how to identify between important and key facts vs just writing down everything that was said. I then had to practice reviewing the notes immediately after the meeting and clarifying or editing the notes for readability and understanding. This all happened over weeks of trial and error. When something didn’t work, I would go back and see what the issue was. As you can see, this is very time consuming and this was just 1 small area of my professional life.
4. Rinse and repeat.
   • Keep on practicing the skills over and over. Keep refining your process each day. Look for ways to improve and be better. One day you will wake up to find that now it’s an integral part of your habit.
5. Tips and tricks – you can look up detailed instructions on the internet on how to implement these systems.
   • Reduce clutter.
     • Clean up your emails, folders, desktops and notes. Go through each area and identify what’s important vs what’s not. Delete everything that isn’t relevant and file away the things that you will need in the future.
   • Use calendars or planners.
     • Timeblocking
     • Put everything into your calendar.
   • Keep a notebook (whether physical or digital). Only 1 though.
     • Make lists.
     • Review those lists often.
6. Incorporate tools. Here are some that I have tried, not everything worked for me, but maybe it will work for you! This actually goes back to Accounting Skill #5, make your software work for you!
   • Buy a notebook – this is the one I come back to time and time again. I have a notebook that I put everything into, with the exception of my meeting notes which I keep in my notes app on my computer. My to do lists, important reminders, random thoughts I have in my head, questions that I need to ask people all go into here! Because there is one place that I keep all my things, it’s reassuring for my brain to know I can always go and look back in my notebook for answers. I don’t have to think about hm where did I put that note?
   • An online to do list – there are so many of these free and paid online. I couldn’t use these because they were overwhelming to me.
   • Google Calendar – all my meetings go into my Google calendar. I sync my personal calendar into my work calendar so that I can see my whole day at a glance. I know if I have a dinner I have to leave work early for, I can plan accordingly. Nothing in my life happens outside of my Google calendar. My husband and I also share a family calendar that we put all our shared activities into as well. I can look in GCal and know my entire day whether it’s for me, work, or for my family.
   • Email clients – learn how to maximize your email client. Use filters, send later, snooze, mute, etc to control the chaos that is your inbox!
   • Folder management software – these tools can help you organize your folders based on a set of rules or workflows.
   • Anything else that you use that I’ve missed here? I’m always on the lookout for a new tool!

I will repeat what I said before. This is a process. It will not happen overnight. You need to be intentional in the beginning and make sure you are committed to the outcome. Refine your processes and choose ones that work for you. Throw out bad habits and build new ones.

Building these habits are really going to make you stand out on your team. People will go to you to find things, they’ll know your name. They will be able to look at your work product and say so-and-so always produces very clear, concise, and organized workpapers. I have someone on my team who I know can find anything in our folders because she is meticulous about managing files. If I can’t find something, she’s the first one I’ll ask.

As my career has progressed, I’ve had to evolve with technology and grow with my role. What used to work for me 5 years ago, probably doesn’t work for me now. I’m constantly reviewing my workflows and looking for ways to be more organized and stay focused. It sometimes feels like a never ending battle, but it’s also part of the experience right?