What Will I Do With Myself?

We All Have Time Categories

Before retirement, life has a way of gobbling up all the time available to it.  After retirement it probably does too, but at least we should have a little more say in where we spend our time!

Before retirement it is probably useful to plan how to use our time by breaking down our activities into categories.  The categories might vary from person to person but some examples might be Work, Sleep, Hobbies, House Chores and Volunteer work.  Some of our time is mostly determined by others, with work and commuting time being the biggest obvious example.

After retirement I’d like to think time is a little more flexible.  However it still may help for planning purposes to start with some categories.  Here are four to consider:

• Work
• Play
• Travel
• Volunteerism

Work

Most of us will work at least some in retirement, both for income and for the social contact.  What percentage of time do you want to spend working?  Look for options including part time, seasonal, and short term “consulting” type gigs.  How will your working time fit around you other time priorities?

Play

Play could probably be broken down into lots of categories depending on your interests.  In here might be hobbies, hanging out with friends, reading, or just plain relaxing.  You might even want to throw in things like learning new skills, or higher education in topics of your interest.

Travel

Travel could take many forms.  It might be anything from an around the world cruise to regular trips to see the grandkids.  Camping and road trips would fall into this category.  And don’t overlook the simple “travel” destinations.  For example I live outside Philadelphia and there are dozens of historic sites and museums available for day trips.  Most of these I haven’t seen since I was a kid and I am long ovedue!

Volunteerism

Volunteering can take many forms and this is a subject that certainly deserves many posts.  However for our purposes here think about how important volunteerism is and what percentage of your time you want to devote to it.

How To Use Your Categories

Once you have some basic categories defined you can start to dig more into the question of “What Will I Do With Myself?”  Try this approach – get a piece of paper or use your computer and list your categories.  Then list a whole bunch of ideas under each category.  Don’t worry about how practical they are for the moment.

For example under “Play” you might list dozens of possible hobbies (another topic that needs more posts.)  Then decide on a couple that you want to pursue.  Obviously it probably pays to pick some inexpensive ones first.  For example say you pick Coin Collecting.  Coin collecting can take many forms, and get rather expensive if you start collecting valuable coins.  But you might start by collecting pennies of different dates from your pocket change.

Your category List and the ideas it contains can be very useful both before and during retirement.  Let’s say you find yourself in a situation where you know you are spending too much time sitting in front of the TV (you know the feeling.)  Well you can pull out your handy dandy list and come up with a new hobby to try!

Hopefully you now have some ideas on how to figure out what you will do with yourself.

Until next time…