5 Tips for Professionals Who Aren't Quite Ready for Retirement
As you approach retirement age, you may be thinking about how to reduce your responsibilities in the office and looking to change how you structure your days. Or maybe you find yourself on the brink of retirement age without any desire to step away from your work.
Firmspace is committed to helping its members find fulfillment and manage their lives in and out of the office, and we’ve pulled together some advice to help you navigate this decision and transition.
1. Retire with a Plan – and Not Just One for Your Finances
This may sound like obvious advice, but we’ve found that it’s important to articulate this clearly.
We’re all encouraged to carefully craft our financial plans for retirement over the course of decades, but we’re not often asked to seriously consider what we plan to with our time in retirement.
If you’ve been thinking of retirement as a chance to shut your office door for good and step away from all the phone calls, texts, and emails you’ve fielded every day of your professional life, this may sound radical. But you shouldn’t wait until it’s time to log out of your professional emails for the last time to think about what you want to do the next day.
Jumping out of the workforce and into full-time home life can be an abrupt transition, especially in the middle of a pandemic when so many of us are already spending more time at home than usual. So, as you would with any other major decision, take time to figure out what you want to do with your time in retirement, set tangible goals, and make a plan to achieve them.
You may just find that it leads you back to work you love.
2. Identify What Your Work Brings to Your Life
To figure out what you want next, you’ll may need to sit down and ask yourself what it is that work has brought to your life in recent months and years:
Has it given you a sense of purpose or fulfillment?
Did your job become something you continued to do primarily to meet your financial goals?
Was work where you went for the social engagement you need on a regular basis?
The answer is likely a combination of your answers to these questions, or it may be something else altogether, but if part of the puzzle for you is financial – and it probably is – you’re not alone.
Even before the pandemic struck, many Americans were planning to stay in the workforce to make ends meet: SimplyWise’s January 2021 Index found that 71 percent of workers plan to continue working in retirement.
Just because you want or need to keep working doesn’t mean you can’t use retirement as an opportunity to change what that work looks like or to change careers entirely.
3. Find the Work-Life Balance You Need in Retirement
In this era when “retirement” no longer necessarily means “post-professional living,” you have many options in how you choose to spend your time, health and finances permitting. But there are three popular approaches we’ve seen our friends, family, and members enjoy:
Go part-time. Rather than leaving your role or the workforce altogether, keep engaging in the work you love on a more flexible schedule that allows you to get more from your personal life.
Transition into a consulting role in lieu of exiting altogether, you may be able to stay onboard as a consultant with more flexible hours and responsibilities. If you’ve been running your own independent firm or agency, this may be the gentle transition to new management that you and your business need.
Seek out a bridge role. This may mean taking a lesser title, but you may find a role in your current organization or elsewhere that allows you to leverage your expertise to serve as a liaison between different departments.
Whatever version of this works for you, as you begin to move toward the next phase of your life, look for ways to dedicate time to deep work in a way that allows you to spend more time with family and friends than you could as a full-time professional.
4. Don’t Be Afraid to Try Something New
Trying something new might mean playing a round of golf or doing yoga every morning, or it could be teaching a couple of courses at your alma mater as an adjunct lecturer. In retirement, you have options.
Whether you already have a retirement project in mind or you’re seeking out goals, this is a great opportunity to broaden your horizons and dig deeper into areas that interest you.
If you’re not sure where to begin in your search for something new, look for inspiration in essays for business leaders by business leaders or in the queue of unplayed podcasts you’ve been meaning to listen to.
5. Find a Third Place That Fulfills Your Needs
As you shift into your next role, it may help you to establish a routine of visiting a third place – a new location that’s not home or your old office space where you can continue to develop a sense of who you are and get your work done.
Before the pandemic, this might have been a health club or a country club, or a local park, but today, but especially in these times, that third place might be a secure, private workspace where you can deliver a confidential customer experience or write your memoir.
Whether you need the social connection of work or the out of home routine, give yourself the space you need to meet your goals in retirement, even if you only need that space a few days a month.
If you think Firmpace might be that space for you, check out our locations online or schedule a tour.
Photo by Roland Samuel on Unsplash