Tickler / To-do / Toy Box

In the "Journey to Retiring" series:

I am incredibly fortunate to have a transition year next year -- before I officially retire -- where I'll get paid part of my salary and keep my job-related medical insurance, but not have teaching or committee obligations.  During my upcoming sabbatical (which officially starts on July 1), I'll definitely keep busy doing the mathematical research that I promised in my sabbatical application I would do, but I'll also have a bunch of unstructured time away from the deadline-driven demands that has been my norm.

All this is to say, when people have asked me, "what will you do when you retire?," I have difficulty answering.  The difficulty is not that I can't think of anything; it's that there's so much, SO much.

The months leading up to May were jam-packed with job-related stuff, and I let it pile on.  It's one of the things I appreciate about the academic calendar:  April is always a hurricane, but we know the hurricane will dissipate once the semester ends.  My friends and family in other kinds of jobs don't have the same ebb-and-flow, and when things get hectic for them, often it stays hectic or gets more so.  For me, though, I know that I get to be completely swamped by urgent tasks and ceremonies and meetings and reports and student meltdowns and such, but I'll be swamped only for so long.  I don't mind holding my breath and paddling as hard as I can, because I know I'll get to breathe in May.

At the same time, though, beyond the shores of May there are all sorts of new adventures beckoning.  In the past, I would have figured out a time and structure for each of these, and dropped it into a particular future month in my "Tickler file" (or I would have declined and deleted the idea).  But the open spaces ahead are so much more open than I've been used to, that I gave up all pretense of figuring out when-and-where these future projects should go.  Even as I submerged myself in March and April academia tasks, I also started collecting piles (literal and figurative) of "someday" projects, ideas that I might want to think about during the summer, or activities I might want to take up during my sabbatical year, or even after.  Nowadays, now that May (which is still strangely a whirlwind) is here, I'm starting to sift through these piles of projects and sort them out.

Julie Morgenstern, one of my favorite organizing gurus, writes about how terrible toy boxes are, organizationally speaking:  they make clean-up a cinch, but retrieval a nightmare.  She points out that savvy kids stop putting their favorite toys "away" in a toy box, because they know that's the surest way to lose them.  But me, I created a metaphorical "To-do Toy Box" for all of those someday projects . . . or rather, several toy boxes.

 I've got a spreadsheet of books that have been recommended to me, and also a shelf full of reading material that's just groaning with "read me!" wannabes.

Middle shelf: A pile of books and magazines to read "someday", 
plus crossword puzzles I saved for later,
and materials for the denim yoga mat I'm actually currently working on.

On my desk: a folder for blog ideas,
plus various folders with clippings of things
that at some point I decided I'd want to do in the future.

I've got a whole email folder where I've been chucking stuff to come back to later.  It's mildly selective (it's got 30 different emails in it, but not 300); even so, it's much denser than my "@to do" folder (7 emails), "# waiting for replies" (3 emails), or "#-upcoming appointments" (15).  

Underneath my CD/craft shelfs:  boxes and boxes of
family memorabilia (photos, letters, documents)
that I want to digitize, organize,
and then get the heck out of my house.

I've also got (as the photos show) piles of projects tucked away in various corners in the house.  The piles are not generally of the get-in-my-way variety, but I do hope to beat them down in the future and reclaim that space at the margins of my life.  

So that's a bit of one stage of what my journey to retirement looks like:  I've been letting these Someday Projects pile up in heaps and boxes, ignoring them while I've worked on and played with the stuff that's been right in front of me.  I'll write eventually about how I decided to sort through these piles and create order out of . . . well, if not exactly "chaos", then something more like "amassed mish-mash".