This is the time of year when my anxiety level goes into the stratosphere. There is a lot of work to be done, but the quantity is not the problem.

What makes me toss and turn sleepless at night and clenches my gut during the day is the knowledge that what I do has a very short timeline and is critical to our operation. Mistakes I make will negatively impact lots of customers and many employees.

And if I were operating on my own, I could feel confident that it would all be done correctly and in a timely fashion. Not the case, however. What I do interfaces with several other offices and doing my tasks accurately is heavily dependent on others doing theirs properly. But blaming someone else for my errors is pusillanimous; pointing fingers pointless.

We have lost the redundancy in personnel that we had in previous years, creating a potential disaster; for instance, if the one single person who is supposed to input personnel information gets ill or quits, there is a hiatus while another person is tapped to step in and a horrible flurry of errors while he/she learns what is to be done during the competency gap.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to do my analysis based on his/her data...well, you get the picture. See why I'm stressed?