The Golden Years – Adjusting to a New Life (I)

Everything we have been discussing is about putting the retiree in control of their affairs and making the living of a happy, meaningful, deliberate, productive and purposeful life in retirement a possibility and reality. In so doing, we have taken up some activities that a retiree could consider engage themselves in. Again, we need to keep in mind that these are by no means exhaustive. Each retiree can come up with activities that they are interested in based on the principles that we recommended. But coming out of a hyperactive stage in the life of careers and professions, many retirees are inclined to want to choke their time with a myriad of activities in the hope of recreating the lifestyle that they just left. I think that is unnecessary, at least it shouldn’t be so for just the purpose of being ‘busy’. Instead, what is important is that the retiree should have a clear purpose and a routine that is both sufficiently engaging to keep them away from living sedentary and unproductive lives, and also ‘easy’ enough to accomplish required and set tasks.  Whether we want to accept it or not, ‘age is not just a number’. We can be as healthy as we may be lucky to be in our sixties, seventies and eighties. However, a retiree should not lose sight of the fact at their age, their body and organs have worked harder and longer than most mechanical appliances the retiree has seen in their lifetime and deserve some extra care through both appropriate levels of physical activities and required quantum of rest.

After establishing what your retirement purpose is, the next thing to do is to identify and choose the specific activities that you wish to fit into the routine that we discussed earlier. I would suggest that activities should be grouped into four as daily, weekly, monthly and annual. This will depend on our preferences, interests, what works best for us and what we may be doing in retirement.  Some individuals do certain things best in the mornings whilst others do the same things best in the evenings. On the other hand, a retiree may be engaged as a part-time lecturer in a tertiary institution and is expected to conduct their classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10 am to 12 pm. In this case, the retiree has to adjust their other activities to fit in with this commitment.

Whatever may be the broad activities chosen, a retiree should develop a simple and broad guiding template such as the figure shown below. What such planning does is create an order level that saves the retiree from running around perhaps doing many things but with little purpose and therefore little ultimate achievements. Another thing to take into cognizance in creating such templates is that they should not be crowded, thereby allowing room for other exigent activities that can come up with little or no notice at all.

The essence of a broad activity template is to lay out the activities you plan to engage in during the weekdays, weekends as well as on a monthly and annual basis. Recall we mentioned that when you were employed and/or were running your business, your daily routine, which is the basis of most of your activities, was literally cut out for you. You did only a ‘little’ in that regard through ‘compliance’ as you were sort of put on autopilot. Now you need to create what you will do and when. In addition, as we age, many of us begin to forget little and not-so-little stuff in our lives. Having a broad activity plan, and which you stick with will help imprint the most important things you will need to be doing. With time, your body and mind will lock into those activities and you will remember them with little or no prompting.

After developing a broad activity, which is like the top-level schema you have, you will need then to go into greater detail by drawing a weekly activity. This is where you will add more flesh to what you will be doing for the coming week. You can choose any starting day and list out what you will be doing over the next seven days. Given that our working week starts on Mondays, it may be advisable to draw your weekly list of activities on Sundays. After a week’s plan is drawn, the next thing you will need to be doing is to review and amend, as may be required the following day’s activities every night. Reviewing your next day’s activities the night before helps you first in articulating in fine detail what your activities will be the following day. Secondly, going through the activities helps your mind internalize what is ahead the following day and you will likely sleep better, and wake up stronger and clearheaded knowing full well what you will be doing for the day.

It is crucial to understand that what you draw is not cast in stone and changes can arise which we should willingly adapt as may be expedient. What these broad, annual, monthly, weekly and daily activity plans do is simply bring out an operating guide so that you don’t run around without heed, thereby making it possible for you to achieve your long-term goals. Remember, no success at any stage in life happens by accident.