“Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.” – Susan Cain
I have this fantasy idea for how life will be once I am retired. This is a sense of how I will feel, once I am truly free to do whatever I want, whenever I want to do it. From where I currently sit, in a full time corporate role, this autonomy seems like a dream state. I imagine it will feel a little like winning a time lottery. If there was such a thing. But, I’ve heard tales of caution towards going headlong into this state of bliss without some kind of plan.
Evidently, people somehow revert to type once they retire. If they are not already actively pursuing certain kinds of activities prior to retirement, they may not make the commitment to change their habits that much. One statistic I read recently described how much time pre-retirees expected to watch TV when planning for retirement compared to how much time they actually did end up watching TV after retiring. It is astonishing to me that on average some retirees are spending 38-hours per week watching TV! That is a cautionary statistic if I ever read one!
This tendency to watch TV can be attributed to loneliness, limited social interaction, reduced mobility, and a desire for passive entertainment. TV and social media channels are structured to keep eyeballs on the platform, rewarding viewers with dopamine hits as they continue to watch. This is really sad somehow. It is no wonder that people have TV’s in every room of the house!
I don’t think I’ll fall prey to excessive TV watching or casting around for something to do with my time. But, I have been thinking about a rough schedule. Once I have the choice of how to spend my time, I don’t need to go grocery shopping on Saturday, for example. I have planned for exactly one slot of TV watching, dinner and a movie on Sunday night. It could involve family and friends as that day has been designated a ‘social’ kind of day. I figured that weekends will have to be social as that is when all the folks who are not retired have free time!
I kind of like the way this schedule came together. I found some pictures that I had on my computer from random inspiration, collected over time. I didn’t go looking for a representation of every slot. That is not necessary. And I’ve allocated a fair amount of time in the evenings for dinner. Cooking from scratch takes time and I don’t want to be so busy with retirement activities that I fall into the same habit as I have now, which is to save time on dinner. In the evenings I am tired and hungry and want to get into the late evening routine as soon as possible. Quite frankly I could sometimes go to bed at 7:30pm, the day has worn me down so. My hope is not to be in the same boat during retirement.
My plan is to start each day in the early morning with some or all of the first row of my schedule. I’m an early riser now, around 6am. I suspect that will hold into retirement because I seem to be a morning person. I can easily see writing in my journal each morning and then a meditation of 15 minutes or so. Then I can roll into yoga or exercise for 30 minutes. After that I would love to have the time to read or learn something new for an hour or so.
The morning activities will depend on the day and other than grocery shopping and meal prep which I’ll never do on the weekend after I retire, I can be flexible. Some weeks I won’t have outside appointments. Some weeks it will be cold and rainy and I won’t want to go out. Some summer mornings will beckon me into the garden before the heat of the day takes over. And other mornings will be misty and moody and a beach walk is a must. I love the idea of being flexible with a long list of things that I like to do.
A couple of days a week, I’d like to go out for lunch. Or pack a lunch and eat on the go. Beaches and parks are an easy picnic option. Restaurant lunch menus are usually lighter and less expensive. Seems like a good way to meet people and have a nice visit. Lunch is a nice period of time to catch up and leave each person wanting to do it again! Long dinners leave me exhausted and wishing to be home in bed. Yes that sounds like an old person, but I guess I am getting a little bit old!
I could easily spend a couple of hours a week in a library. Honestly, I loved taking my kids to the library. We once had a community library with a replica scaled down red fire engine in it. My kids could spend so much time there, playing in the fire engine, reading books and generally having fun at the library. After that we would go to the grocery store and grab sandwiches from the deli, eating them as we shopped. That was a several hour day for us, easy.
Having the time to read, in the middle of the day, is going to be such a luxury. The only time that happens now is when I’m sick and not sleeping. I had a bout of the flu recently and I read 2 books. That was amazing and sad. Amazing because I still like reading enough to plow through books. Sad because I simply do not have the time in my current schedule. Yes, there are some choices I am making, but by the time it is ‘after-work’, I am exhausted mentally. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.
In the evenings, after dinner is done, I can see myself doing a number of things, picking up from earlier in the day. Of particular interest will be my creative projects. Once I retire, at least a spare bedroom space will be set-up as a studio. My husband is wanting a double car garage to park cars and another garage for his projects. This could easily creep towards a thousand square feet of space. All I want is a studio space where I can leave my projects where they are and not have to clean up each day. If I want to, I can just close the door. This will make coming back to things a lot easier in the evenings.
Thinking about a schedule has made it easier to picture myself in retirement. The idea of the spontaneity and the freedom seems intoxicating, even more so with a rough plan for how it could come to be true. Before I started working on the retirement schedule, I didn’t think I needed one. After all, the freedom not to be a slave to a schedule is something I want to leave behind in the corporate world. But the active planning for examples of how I want to spend my time feels truly liberating!
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