What I Do At Work

I don't generally think much about my office job, because it's just what I do.  But one time, my friend who is a teacher asked me what I do everyday and how I know what I need to do.  I had never really thought about this before.  As a teacher, you go to school and you know that you have to teach every day.  A doctor goes to work and has appointments that they have to follow.  But what do I do as an accountant and how do I know what needs to be done?

First of all, I am an accountant at an insurance company.  So I deal with daily financial transactions that are made and recording things for the financial statements.  Well that's a simplified job description.  There are many different types of accountants and the jobs can vary drastically.

I have tasks that need to be completed daily, weekly and monthly.  Over time, I have just learned what these tasks are and know that they need to be done.  I know what my daily tasks are so that's easy, I just go into work and do them every day.  For everything else, I kind of schedule myself.  I know what needs to be done each month and when it needs to be done by.  I write them all in my calendar.  Mostly this isn't a strict schedule, more of a guideline.  It's basically a lot of time management and planning my own schedule.

Sometimes random things come up that take priority, and in most cases, my regular tasks aren't on a strict enough schedule and I can do them.  Take yesterday for example, I basically didn't ever get to doing what I thought I was going to do.  But that's ok.  It's what keeps life interesting.

I enjoy my job because it does vary.  I'm not doing the exact same thing every day and that keeps it interesting.  Yes I just said that being an accountant can be interesting.  

On Being Done School

On Wednesday I got my mark back for my final exam for my accounting designation.  And I passed.  

As my mom said, I have said that I have failed every exam that I have ever taken, and in reality I have passed them all except for one.  This one was no different, I was positive I had failed.  But I didn't.  And I'm kind of still surprised by it.

So now it's a waiting game.  I'm just waiting for the organization to officially deem me a Certified General Accountant.  And to be honest, it hasn't hit me yet.

I've been in school since I was 5.  I have done 5 years of post-secondary education followed by about 3 years of courses working towards this accounting designation.  That's 8 years of post-secondary!  And I'm done.  It's a weird feeling, that's for sure.  

After 8 years of work, it seems like it should be never ending.  Like I should continue to have courses that I have to be constantly working on and stressing about.  My stress level just dropped dramatically.  I have so many feelings at the moment.  I'm happy, I'm relieved, I'm proud of myself.  I pride myself on not quiting anything and I didn't quit, despite wanting to on multiple occasions.  I'm pretty sure that this calls for a glass of wine.

Working from Home

I commute an hour each way to work.  Which I'm pretty used to, but during the winter it sometimes really sucks.  So I was lucky enough to recently be provided with a laptop so that if needed I could work from home.  

The view from my car on a winter day

Well this winter just won't let up and I woke up to a very windy and snowy day yesterday.  I decided that I was better to be safe than sorry and would work from home.  And I've got to say that I loved it!

Because I got up at my normal time to go to work, I basically ate some breakfast and got into some lulu pants and got straight to work.  So instead of starting work at 8:00, I started at 6:30.  I saved 2 hours of driving, still took a lunch and by 4:00 had put in a 9 hour day!  (Typically my days are 7.5 hours, but this time of year we work a bit of overtime.)

So at 4:00 I got to shut everything down, feeling like I really accomplished a lot during the day and instead of a 1 hour drive I had a 10 second walk out of my office.

I don't know that I would want to do it all the time.  I think that I would feel cut off from my co-workers and might go a bit stir crazy.  But once in awhile it's really nice to be able to stay home, eat lunch with my husband and get a lot of work done with very few distractions.