Isabella Pitt

6:30 AM

Wake up time and time to hit the gym before work I am pretty lucky I only have a 2-minute walk to the gym so I don’t have to get up too early. Quick 30-minute workout to wake my body up and get my mind ready for the day.

7:15 AM

Time for some breakfast and refuelling after the gym to ensure I have enough energy and I am not walking to the biscuit jar once I get to work! I check through a few news pages on social media to see if anything happened overnight, had a quick shower and put on a load of washing.

8:30 AM

Today I am working from home for the first half of the day before I go into the office for some meetings this afternoon. First task of the day is to check through my emails, a reminder to complete my timesheet, a happy birthday announcement of one of my colleagues and a file back from manager review. Looks like it is going to be a busy day!

My work from home set-up is pretty similar to the office, I decided during our mandatory work from home period during COVID that having multiple screens would allow me to work more efficiently I went out and bought some monitors so it felt similar to as if I was in the office.

9:00 AM

It’s the first day of the month so must lodge the timesheet before 11am so all my time can be billed for the month. Usually I am pretty good and do my timesheet each day but I forgot this week. Once the timesheet is lodged, I got stuck into some work for an upcoming audit engagement. We are getting close to year end at the moment, so we are the planning stage of most of our audit engagements, which involves lots of discussions with clients to understand their business processes and to see what has happened in the period so we can tailor our audit procedures for when we come back post year end.

10:30 AM

Started feeling a little peckish so went to the kitchen to find a snack- decided to be healthy today and have a fruit salad and some yogurt to tie me over until lunch. Remembered to hang out my load of washing I put on this morning and back to work.

12:30 PM

Time to go into the office for my meetings. Lucky I only live 10 minutes from the office so I can go in on my lunch break then sit with some colleagues and catch up with what has been happening since I last saw them and enjoy lunch. We can dress for our day now every day so if we don’t have any client facing meetings we can wear office appropriate attire that isn’t overly formal.

2:00 PM

Meeting time… first up is the local aged care industry group catch-up. We have a large client based of aged care clients, particularly in audit, in the Perth office that I started working on as a graduate and have worked on for a couple years. So when the opportunity arose to join the industry group I jumped at the chance to be involved, we usually discuss potential new clients we are tendering for, important issues being faced within the industry and a game plan for business development opportunities on the horizon. My contribution as an Associate isn’t usually much more than observation but the exposure to working with Partners and Managers from other service lines and to business development is exciting.

3:30 PM

Quick snack break in the office usually a few biscuits and a couple of tea in our café area and take in the view.

3:45 PM

Social club meeting time. I am a very organised person and I love organising events so I joined the social club committee as the audit representative at the beginning of the year before COVID hit, so we haven’t been able to do much until now. We finalised all our suppliers, music and decorations for our upcoming Christmas themed sundowner we are having on our balcony. It’s dress up too so must remember to go find my Christmas t-shirt at home.

4:30 PM

Finally back to my desk to smash out some work. Better download the file I got back from the manager this morning. Hopefully, there aren’t too many review notes from the work I did last week.

6:00 PM

Still working hard to clear out these review notes and getting help from the manager before I go back to the client with follow-up queries. Working a bit later tonight because I have netball so time for a pre-game snack.

7:30 PM

Game time! Once a week I play social netball with a few colleagues from work. I started the team up when I was a graduate after we played together in a CAANZ tournament and realised we actually worked pretty well together. It is a great opportunity to socialise with colleagues from different service lines as well as different levels. My body is so sore after that game so hot outside tonight- probably shouldn’t have gone to the gym as well this morning.

8:30 PM

Finally home! Feels like such a long day, time for some dinner and a nice cold shower.

9:00 PM

I am still very awake after playing netball so time to do some study. I am doing the audit and assurance module at the moment as part of the Chartered Accountant program and the exam is coming up so any spare time/energy I have is being spent studying. Managed to do a couple of exam prep questions. This module has been slightly easier than the others as there is a fair bit of overlap from what I’ve learnt on the job to the theory being taught.

10:00 PM

Bed time- a quick scroll through social media and some Netflix to unwind before I do it all again tomorrow.