In my work I look at a lot of details.  It’s something of a detective job, ferreting out the important stuff amid all the other irrelevant bits and pieces of a person’s financial life.  There are a myriad of rules, individual situations, and innumerable combinations.  And things change all the time.

For a person that likes to do my work correctly this can all be overwhelming.  And while I might catch one thing on a transaction there can always be something else I didn’t see.  Lately it feels like there’s an audit error coming my way every week.  Sometimes more than one. I learn from each error, but the next week something totally different rears its ugly head.  Trying not to miss anything causes me to slow down and miss my production goals.  And the audits keep coming.

I know a large part of this is a function of being back in an industry that changed drastically while I was gone.  We are totally paperless now, and that means most of the time you see only one document at a time.  That in conjunction with my lack of short term memory means I am constantly going back and forth between documents. And don’t even talk about the interruptions of phone calls and emails and other employees.  Usually I resort to writing stuff down just to remember it long enough to make a decision.

Still I’m making mistakes, and it’s undermining my confidence.  Today I will go to work and do my best again.   As I’ve told others that I’ve mentored, doing your best is the best you can do.   I believe that.

But it sure is exhausting.