Planning the rest of my life (or at least the next part of it)

 In the "Journey to Retiring" series:

You know how you get to the end of an eight-year plan, where everything has snapped right into place just as you'd scheduled it to, and now with the eight years all done, you find yourself oddly directionless?  

Actually, I know that most other people don't operate like that, but that's kind of what happened to me.  One of the years in my life that I felt most existentially at sea was late 2014, right after I'd finished an Ironman Triathlon.  I'd spent the previous two years training and focusing for the event, which I then completed, and all of a sudden there was a large open void with no big goal in front of me.  What the heck would happen from there?

That's when I wrote an eight-year plan, taking me to 2022.  That plan included helping my kids grow and move out of the home, buying a new home, finding a publisher for a book I'd write and publish, as well as a couple of other professional things.  At the end, there was a three-way fork in the road that I wasn't sure about (retire, sabbatical, become a dean), and so the planning ended.   

That plan was a surprisingly accurate predictor of the future.  It took me a year longer to find the publisher than I thought, for example, but the book came out right on schedule, as did the new-to-us home and most of the other things.  I find it incredibly satisfying to be able to will my future into existence like that.

So, facing a year of sabbatical followed by retirement, I'm ready to start pulling together a new set of plans -- not year-by-year like the past one, but at least something to help me make a coherent picture of how I'd like to shape what lies ahead.  I wrote in previous post about how I dumped all sorts of fun ideas into a metaphorical "toy box".  The question remained, though, how to best pull those projects out and put them onto the right (metaphorical) shelves?

I started by trying to make spreadsheets.  For many years, my May ritual has included pulling together color-infused spreadsheets to help organize my summers.  The colored headings not only make these pages more fun to look at (yes!), but they also help me think about broad categories, which in turn help me remember things that I ought to add to the list.  

Summer Project spreadsheets from years past.
Because, yes, I love planning so much that I keep these
and refer to them again in future years.

Alas (or hooray), I had so many fun things in my "I'd like to do this someday" Toy Box that my computer monitor screen was too small for me to get a big picture.  Plus, I felt like I really wanted to stand up, to use my actual body for adding things to the list.  

So then I tried using my chalkboard.  That helped a lot because I could see the overall categories from up-close and from far back.  But I couldn't fit all the projects under each category if I wrote every single one of them in chalk, too.  Fortunately, my chalkboard is magnetic, so I pinned up a sheet of paper under each chalk-written category, and wrote ideas in pencil on each of those sheets of paper.

This worked beautifully.

Making plans for the future

I left this up for a week or two, so I could get an overall sense of the scope of ideas, and also so I could add to the lists as inspiration struck.  My husband said this reminded him of the bulletin board walls in detective shows, where they're trying to figure out who was the mastermind villain, so I added a few strings to enhance the effect.

Like a detective!

I love this.  After about two weeks, I drew pictures on the pages and colored the borders, because I needed a bit of extra fun and color, naturally.  And then I took the pages down and started planning which kinds of projects I'll do soon, and which projects I can wait on for later.  It's nice to have seven big categories of projects to focus on.  

Just to give a sense, here are the big categories and some of the projects on the pages.  You can see there's a lot of overlap between the categories.  Also, for the first category I'm still not sure of a title I can resonate with, but I think I'm getting close.   

Eco Generative (that is, nurturing my "Rubbish rescue artist" tendencies)

• Organize a neighborhood yard sale, connect with city initiatives, build in a Freecycle-posting day to my schedule
• get an induction stove, big question: replace our radiators with a heat pump??

Intellectual adventure

• Work on two big books, a bunch of math papers, look into some distinguished visiting positions and awards, visit math institutes
• longer term:  Family history (organizing & digitizing), learn how to weld

Building community

• Learn "thriller" dance, organize a block party, volunteer at church, invite people to special dinners, plan trips to see friends

Financial independence

• Make appointments with TIAA people, update beneficiaries, submit retirement paperwork, figure out medical insurance, get the Amtrak app on my phone, move savings accounts around from low-interest to higher-interest/CDs, update my CV

Home & craft projects 

• Finish my yoga mat (done!), Design bedroom reading lights, make more cow shelves, bookshelves, wash windows, design a laundry rack pulley system to bring clothes from the back patio up to the second-floor balcony

Family

• Organize special dinners, help my dad with storage units (done), make birthday cards for the year, reorganize some of the family information in my command center, build in grandchild time

Health and fitness: physical and mental

• Read books, exercise gregariously, meditation, make lunch dates with friends, pick up the banjo again