As an educator, retirement sources were always educating me that prep time for retirement was a minimum of five years. When I lost my father and my mother was aging, I knew she'd need my care. She lived in Kansas and I lived in Oklahoma which meant a life spent on the road. For the next five years, I researched everything I needed to know in order to retire in five years.
Retirement isn't arbitrary and it's an important phase of life for you and your partner and your family. I had been a writer my entire life so I knew early on that I would write FT in my retirement. I looked forward to the freedom of scheduling my own life. No bosses, supervisors, etc. My final year teaching at the university, I decided to change very little in my routine so as to avoid a drastic shift.
I quickly learned that I had overlooked a few things in drafting it. The first is that I live in Oklahoma where it's hateful hot. No workouts in the high heat of daytime. The best thing about this was that it didn't require an act of Parliament to redraft my schedule. I make small adjustments from time to time due to visitors or conferences, etc. but the bulk of the schedule changed little after that first edit.
My second draft looked like this:
Morning: Rise 6 - 7
Feed Rumble and Jackson: 6 - 7
Writing Session 1: 10 - 1:00
Lunch: 1:00
Workout Session 1: 1:30 - 2:00
Writing Session 2: 2:00 - 3:00
Workout Session 2: 3:00 - 4:00
Retirement allows a flexibility that working life did not. Take advantage of that for all aspects of planning for your life in retirement. It allows you to explore new things, new experiences, and seek new understandings of who you are. You're no longer that twenty-something or thirty something so who are you now and what do you long to discover? Go for it with all the gusto you have.
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