When people imagine retirement, they often think about what they will do with all the extra time.
Travel more. Play golf. Walk the dog. Look after the grandchildren. Spend more time in the garden. Join a club. Read the books that have been sitting on the shelf for years.
These can all be valuable parts of retirement. But will they be enough? Enough for a fulfilling retirement.
What will make you feel useful?
I was reminded of this during a recent retirement coaching conversation. We were talking about what a successful retirement might look like. As the conversation developed, it became clear that the important question was not simply how to fill the days. It was how to continue contributing.
There is a significant difference between being busy and feeling useful.
Work gives us more than an income
For most of our adult lives, work provides structure. There is somewhere to be on Monday morning. People expect things from us. Problems need solving. Decisions need making. Someone notices whether we turn up.
Work can also provide something less obvious: evidence that we matter.
A colleague asks for your opinion. A client needs your experience. Someone younger benefits from something you have learned over thirty years. At the end of the day, however tiring or frustrating work has been, you can often point to something you contributed.
Then retirement arrives. The alarm clock disappears. Your diary becomes wonderfully empty. Nobody is waiting for that report or asking you to join a meeting.
Initially, that freedom may feel fantastic. But after a while, some people discover that what they miss is not necessarily their job. They miss being needed. There are too many ‘cookies’.
A full diary is not necessarily a fulfilling one
The obvious response is to become busy: golf on Monday. Walking group on Tuesday. Grandchildren on Wednesday. Lunch with friends on Thursday. Gardening on Friday.
There is nothing wrong with any of this. But retirement should not become an exercise in filling empty squares in a calendar. You can have a very busy week and still wonder what it was all for.
Equally, you might spend only a few hours doing something that makes a genuine difference to somebody else and come away feeling that it was one of the most valuable parts of your week.
It’s not about time spent, but what is done in that time. Activities occupy time but not provide meaning, it’s the quality of that time that does.
What does useful mean to you?
Feeling useful does not mean you need to start another career. Nor does it mean turning retirement into an endless list of obligations.
- For one person, usefulness might come from helping to care for grandchildren.
- For someone else, it could be volunteering for a local organisation.
- You might mentor somebody at the beginning of their career, become involved with a charity, help run a sports club or use your professional knowledge in a completely different setting.
- You might teach, coach, create, organise or simply become the person who regularly checks in on somebody who would otherwise be alone.
Contribution does not have to be grand. Often, the smallest roles provide the strongest sense that you still have something valuable to give.
This was one of the interesting themes from my recent coaching conversation. The things that appeared energising were not simply leisure activities. They included coaching, creativity, working with younger people, community and spending time in nature.
That is quite different from drawing up a retirement bucket list. It asks not only, “What do I want to experience?” but also, “Where can I contribute?”
Retirement does not have to mean stopping
Perhaps part of the problem is the word retirement itself.
To the person I was speaking with it meant withdrawal; retirement from something. After decades of building a career, developing skills and accumulating experience, you are suddenly supposed to stop.
That may suit some people perfectly. But others might prefer to think of this stage of life as a change in how they use their time. Paid work might still form part of it, but on different terms. You might work because you enjoy the people, the challenge or the contribution, rather than because you need the salary.
You could choose projects that interest you and decline those that do not. The aim is not necessarily to recreate your old working life with fewer hours. It is to decide which parts are worth carrying forward and which you are happy to leave behind.
That can make the transition far less stark.
The three year question
One exercise I use in retirement coaching is to look a few years ahead. Imagine it is three years from now and you are reflecting on that period with a sense of satisfaction.
What needs to have happened?
- What would you like to have done professionally?
- What would you like to have done personally?
- Which relationships would you like to have strengthened?
- What would you like to have learned or created?
- Where would you like to have contributed?
- What would make you think, “That was a good three years”?
The answers can be revealing. They might include travel and adventure, but they may equally involve health, family, community, creativity or doing work that feels meaningful.
Once you know what those things are, retirement planning becomes much richer than calculating whether your pension is large enough.
Money creates the opportunity
None of this makes the financial side of retirement less important.
In fact, it is the opposite. A good financial plan can give you the freedom to decide how much of your time you want to exchange for money. If your pensions and investments can support your lifestyle, paid work becomes a choice rather than an obligation.
That can completely change your relationship with work. You may decide to stop altogether. You may reduce your hours. Or you may continue doing selected work because you enjoy it.
The financial plan provides the platform. It does not decide what you should build on top of it; that part is personal.
Think about contribution as well as consumption
Much of retirement planning is understandably about consumption.
- How much can I spend?
- Where will I travel?
- What car will I buy?
- Can I help the children?
- Can we afford the house we want?
These are useful questions. But a successful retirement may involve thinking about what flows in the other direction too.
What will you give?
Your time. Your knowledge. Your attention. Your experience. Your creativity. Your support.
After perhaps thirty or forty years of working, raising families and dealing with everything life has thrown at you, you have accumulated far more than money. You have accumulated experience.
Retirement gives you much greater freedom to decide where that experience goes.
So, as you imagine life after work, by all means think about holidays, hobbies and how you will spend your days. But also ask yourself a slightly different question.
When nobody is paying you to turn up anymore, what will still make you feel that you have something worthwhile to contribute?
The answer may tell you far more about the retirement you want than any list of ways to keep yourself busy.
