Accounting for time: managing your time as if it was your money.

• Author: Setter, Amber
• Position: Personal development

Members of the accounting profession are driven by the notion of time. This is true if you're in a public firm measuring billable hours or in industry with filing and reporting deadlines. The regulatory environment is such that CPAs can't help but pay a lot of attention to the clock.

While each of us wakes up each day with 24 hours to "spend," most professionals will tell you they often feel like they don't have enough time. There's an opportunity cost that comes from looking at your time as if it was fixed. It makes the status quo too easy to accept versus seeing the possibility for a new relationship to time.

CPAs know there are ways to grow money when it comes to actual dollars. So why not apply that same principle and identify ways to expand your energy by managing it as if it was money?

Time As Energy

Like money, time is a currency that can be measured in units. Similarly, you can begin to think about how your energy available to complete tasks is also measureable.

Energy management may be a new concept for you. The simplest way to shift your mindset to a new direction is to think about how you can begin to monitor your level of energy--just like your cell phone monitors the life of its battery. Are you at 100 percent, feeling charged and ready to go? Or are you at 10 percent, feeling like you need to plug in or switch to power saving mode?

The ability to assess one's level of energy is a valuable tool for knowledge workers like CPAs. Consider how the quality of your work would improve if you took on the critical thinking tasks when your battery was charged versus when you brain is tired and operating at a dangerously low level.

So, how do you learn how to assess your energy? Wouldn't it be nice if we had thermometers that read our body temperature and our energy levels? The good news is you don't need a gadget to read where you are. With practice, you can learn to assess your energy levels and gauge the impact of your daily activities on those levels.

It's all about getting to know yourself and noticing when you're in the zone and when you aren't.

To start, pay attention to what tasks excite you versus those that drain you. The tasks that drain us are usually things we don't like doing because they are routine, monotonous or misaligned with our interests. Draining tasks actually have a lot of potential because they often are things we should stop doing or delegate. An easy way to grow as a leader is to free yourself of tasks you have...