2025 Tax Season: Protect Your Health

These practices are good for your health, your business, and your clients

January is always a busy month for me: I am teaching tax update seminars in various locations across the country, so I have a lot of travel. This year, I got sick at Christmas time, got better, got sick again, and got better. On January 20, 2025, I taught an eight-hour tax update seminar in Los Angeles; my voice was gone the next day. One week later, my voice still has not fully recovered, and I had to cancel my attendance at one seminar and get other speakers to fill in for me at two others.

This was a sign to slow down and reconsider the amount of traveling I had committed to; I had previously decided to do less work travel in 2025 and beyond.

Illness has impacted my business in a major way once before: I contracted COVID-19 while teaching a seminar, and I was out of commission completely for the first two weeks of October 2021. Unable to work, I lost several clients who were on extension because I could not do their tax returns in my mental and physical state.

I have always tried to have a healthier work-life balance, an anomaly in this industry. I attribute this, in part, to being a cancer survivor: ever since my leukemia diagnosis twelve years ago, I never had the mental energy to work at a desk for ten hours a day; once I hit six or seven hours, I hit a wall. I am also more susceptible to sickness lasting longer if I get sick, so my energy levels are affected for longer. I know my limits; sometimes, it is hard to accept them.

Tax season directly impacts your mental and physical health, and you should make every effort to structure your work to maintain and support your health.

Below are strategies I recommend for tax season to protect your health; many also have other positive benefits for your business, clients, and family.

I genuinely believe that tax professionals can structure their businesses so that tax season is a “normal” workweek. At the same time, I realize that this is an aspirational goal for many tax professionals and not their current reality. I also recognize that some people would prefer to work hard during tax season and have significant downtime for the remainder of the year.

Get A Good Night’s Sleep

Sleep is essential to your health and success in your businesses. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), sufficient sleep can help you:

• Get sick less often,

• Reduce stress and improve your mood,

• Improve your attention and memory to perform daily activities better, and

• Lower your risk for various other medical conditions.

The CDC recommends that adults sleep at least seven hours per night.

Insufficient sleep can also lead to degraded work product. We must be mentally alert to do proper due diligence and help taxpayers identify opportunities they can take advantage of in the tax code. We also make mistakes when deprived of sleep.

Take Breaks from Work

Do not work through lunch: Stop work at least once daily, if not more often, for optimal performance and improved mental health.

This article from Harvard Business Review provides a lot of helpful information on taking work breaks for optimal effect. For example:

Our review demonstrates that taking a break at outdoors and enjoying the green space is far better for recharging workers’ resources than simply staying at a desk.

Those who supervise staff should encourage staff breaks and role model good behavior by taking breaks themselves.

Limit Your Amount of Daily Work

Long working hours can negatively impact mental and physical health and workplace dynamics. This article provides a good summary of the dangers and how overwork can be avoided.

Let’s be real: the client you work on in hour 13 of a workday does not get the same attention and mental capacity as the client you work on in hour one of a workday. You are far more likely to make errors and miss opportunities on your 13th hour of work. In addition, practitioners working in this manner likely fail their Circular 230 obligations for proper due diligence; most likely this is not intentional, but it still happens.

If my work demands are at a peak, I do not work longer hours in a day: I simply work on the weekend for a few hours as needed. This ensures I am at my best mental capacity to get that work done, and I still have plenty of free time during the week and weekend to rest and recharge.

Once again, those who supervise staff should role model good behavior by working appropriate amounts and telling staff to “go home” if they are beyond their contracted working hours.

Disengage Toxic Clients

Toxic clients increase stress levels, cause employees to consider leaving a firm, and negatively impact the mental health of everyone in the office. Their negative energy affects your good clients: you will be less productive due to their influence, and work quality will be affected.

We are under no obligation to work with a taxpayer on their tax matters. We can choose who we work with, whether they are a prospect or a twenty-year client. If their service is a la carte tax preparation, simply do not offer them the ability to return. I know many practitioners believe they cannot do this to an existing client; however, if they decided not to use you, trust me, they would not be as concerned as you are.

I know many practitioners will simply charge more to difficult clients - the so-called “PITA fee” or “raise their prices until you enjoy their company.” I wholeheartedly disagree with this premise; we should work primarily with our ideal clients. Treating the practitioner and staff with respect is a component of being an ideal client.

There are so many people in need of competent tax help that a practitioner does not need to cling to a toxic client for fear of revenue loss. Drop the toxic client; a new, better client will be waiting to take their place.

Attend Family and Friend Events

When you are at the end of your life, you will not regret not doing more tax returns, but you may have regrets about the important things: missing important events from January through April and September through October. Take time for the things that matter in life. The tax return will be done eventually.

In Closing

I take a week-long vacation each year during tax season in March. I have structured my business so that it is not an issue for me to do this, and I do not work on vacation (except checking email once daily in the morning).

I mention this to emphasize that you can design the business you want to support your life; your business does not, and should not, dictate your life. There is a better way than the toxic practices the tax industry has historically embraced.

We have to structure our businesses to support our health and maintain our professional obligations under Circular 230. I seriously doubt a practitioner working 14 hours a day, seven days a week, can meet their ethical obligations for proper due diligence and their moral obligation to do the best work possible for their client.

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