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

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".  

Journey to retiring: what people ask me

I thought it might be nice to chronicle some of the particular aspects of what it's like to go from being a full-time faculty member to being a retiree, and so here's one peek at the current state of that transition, through the lens of questions that my co-workers have been asking me this past month.

What are you going to do when you go on sabbatical or retire?

This is a really obvious question to ask, and my short answer is "math!"  There's a somewhat longer answer, which involves one or two specific papers, some research with undergraduates, and longer-term projects involving potential books.  I have a couple of other big things that I hope to do, like hone my skills as a rubbish rescue artist, and then later work on organizing family heirloom photos, and learn to do welding.  

And more.  Mostly, though, I've been trying to get to the end of the semester; I figure I'll start thinking more specifically about the future later, once the summer truly arrives.  

I might do a bunch of this, 
but I have a lot of other plans, too!

(Variation on the above) Are you planning to travel?

I guess this is another obvious question, considering how many people suggest this. (No one has asked, "are you going to sit on the front porch and solve crossword puzzles?", or even "are you going to stay up late reading library books?", but the "are you planning to travel?" question is a biggie).

Yes, but with caveats.  One constraint is that as I become increasingly Eco-nutty, I have more and more aversions to taking airplanes, so I'm unlikely to, say, decide to fly to Ye Olde Touriste Spotte just for the heck of it.  I'm hoping that being unconstrained by work will allow me to do more train travel instead of flying to math meetings, but I have to figure that out still.  A second constraint is figuring out a good dog-sitting plan.  (I know there are options; I just haven't figured out which ones will work for us best yet.)   

A third--and very significant--constraint is that my husband and I travel in very different ways.  He flits and jumps at whatever interests him; I have a purpose and a plan that shapes my travel.  Several years ago, for example, he planned a once-in-a-lifetime trip across Russia.  He spent months beforehand telling me about all of his latest itinerary changes and lining up Visas and such.  In the end, he visited 17 countries, none of which was Russia. I'd go bonkers trying to keep up with him, and he'd go stir-crazy on my own more regimented travels. I don't think either one of us (or our marriage) could survive a trip where we spent the whole time trying to synchronize our schedules and itinerary.  My best guess is that our best shot at joint exploration is that I will pick a Task Oriented Thing (like teaching a math class in Rwanda, or visiting a Math Institute or a colleague somewhere), and we'll use my itinerary as the center from which my guy will ping-pong in and out and here and there to his heart's content, so we'll have a shared hub but different modes.  

How are you feeling about your last class? Are you excited? Are you going to get all teary?

I don't do feelings in the same way that other people do, so I don't entirely know how to answer this question.  

Um, no?

I was really glad that our department has started a tradition of clapping professors out on their last class, because ending my last class with, "well, I guess that's the end . . . " would have felt highly anticlimactic.  It was nice to have a Ceremonial Moment to mark that transition, and it was good to share the moment not just with the particular students sitting in the room at the time, but also other students who came back for the event and with my colleagues.  

My students and colleagues decorated the chalkboard.
I loved it!

Wait: are you really going to retire? I didn't see you at the ceremony honoring retirees, so have you changed your mind?

I haven't actually formally submitted my retirement paperwork yet.   Next academic year (July 1, 2023-June 30, 2024), I'm going to be on sabbatical, meaning I'll still get a large fraction of my normal pay and I'll still get medical (etc) benefits, but I won't teach classes or serve on committees.  The usual rule for faculty members is that we're supposed to come back for a full year of normal work after a sabbatical, but I have a special exception: I was granted a sabbatical two years ago, and I postponed it to become an Associate Dean.  I had it written into my contract that therefore my next sabbatical doesn't have the usual come-back-for-a-year requirement.  

So my retirement date isn't official in the paperwork sense, but I'm really not teaching any more, and I'm planning to submit my paperwork later this summer, meaning that June 30, 2024 I won't be officially employed anymore, either.  

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That's all the question/answer mojo I've got for now.  More transition updates will be forthcoming!