Incremental Retirement

Originally, I started using the term “incremental retirement” as a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for being unemployed. Over the years, though, it’s grown into something that I think should be taken a little more seriously. The idea is just that, rather than working full-tilt until you’re 65 (or 70, or 75, or whatever it is by the time you get there) and then stopping cold, you should break it up a bit. Why put off all the things you want to do until then? Partly, this is just taking time to stop and smell the roses. It’s a less gonzo alternative to the 4-hour Work Week for those of us who are not entrepreneurs, or perhaps a practice run for those who are. But the more serious side of it has to do with how the nature of work has changed.

My background here is that I’m a software developer, and I’ve worked mostly at little start-ups. It’s an unstable business, and you always have to be learning new stuff. Sometimes jobs have dropped out from under me; sometimes I’ve had to move on to keep from stagnating. So sometimes by chance and sometimes by choice, there have been several times in my career that I’ve found myself with a block of time off, on the order of 3-6 months.

Even if you don’t have any particular plan and just want an extended vacation, stepping back from the day-to-day rush and taking time to get some perspective is huge. Breaking out of your routine lets you look at it from the outside. It also gives you time to look around and see the world, see what other people are doing.

If you have some personal goal, having that time to focus can really help kick-start it. If you’ve been wanting to learn how to paint or play an instrument, or just get more exercise and cook for yourself more, that focus time can get you over the initial learning curve and let you form the habits you need to keep it up.

I read. That’s what I do for fun. Some fiction, but a lot of history, economics, and other stuff about how the world works. Normally, when I’m working full-time, I might get an hour every other night to read. Being able to spend 6-8 hours a day uninterrupted is a completely different experience. It’s not just a question of reading more, it’s the density of experience. If I read a book on economics one day, a book on early medieval history the next, and one on modern sustainable agriculture the day after, those ideas can collide and form connections and work their way into my brain; they probably won’t if that reading is spread out over a month or two.

That goes double for professional development. I can spend half an hour drawing or practicing an instrument and get something out of it. If I’m working on a programming project or trying to learn some new language or set of tools, it doesn’t make sense to even start unless I’ve got at least a couple hours free. And if I only get to work on it once a week, I’ll have forgotten half of what I did last time. Being able to work on it full time accelerates things enormously.

And if I want to learn something really new, or learn it really well, it’s going to take a big block of time. I might be able to learn the basics of a new Java framework in a few days, but if I want to learn a whole new language and set of tools - Lisp, or Arduino programming - that’s weeks or months.

This is why university professors have sabbaticals. They’re the original knowledge workers. It’s not something special about academia; they’re just ahead of the curve. They realized long ago that having that time to explore, research, sharpen your tools, and broaden your horizons is critical. These days, more and more of us are knowledge workers, and that time for renewal is valuable to all of us.

This ties into the big-picture issue here, which is that the nature of work and our relationship with it have changed, and the old model doesn’t make sense anymore. It used to be that work was mostly a physical activity like subsistence farming or sweatshop factory labor. “Retirement” was the point where you just couldn’t do it anymore. These days, most of us are knowledge workers; our jobs aren’t physically demanding. Even in sectors that deal with physical goods, like agriculture and manufacturing, most of the work is done by machines, and the value of people is their knowledge and experience. Being a successful farmer is no longer about being really good at digging. Knowledge and experience increase over time; we just keep getting better at it. Why quit at the top of your game? Increasingly, “retirement” means working part-time and just doing the fun parts of our jobs.

Even if you think you’re going to do a traditional retirement, it’s worth taking time off to road-test it. If your plan is to just spend all day sipping piña coladas on the beach, try it for a few months. For me, the single most valuable thing it’s taught me is that I can’t do that. I can spend a solid month sitting on the porch reading novels, but eventually I get really punchy. I need some sort of structure, something to do, some sense of purpose. If I wake up every morning with an infinity of things I could - and maybe even should - do, but nothing I actually have to do, I’m going to go crazy sooner or later. (And even if you discover that that really is what you want to do all day, you’ll go back to work with a clearer vision of what you’re working for.)

Ok, so how do you make this work? First off, if you can just take a leave of absence from your current job, do it. A friend of mine went to her boss and said, “I really, really want to take 6 months off to travel the world. I’d like to be able to come back to this job when I’m done.” Her boss decided that losing her for 6 months was better than losing her completely. I had one job that I tried to quit outright, and they said, “Well, we’ll keep you on the books as being on leave without pay for 90 days in case you change your mind.” Your employer may be more amenable to this sort of thing than you’d expect, and it probably doesn’t hurt to ask.

If you are just going to step off into the void, you’ve got a bit of a balancing act to do in lining up your next job. In short, network but don’t interview. It seems that these days, companies don’t start the hiring process until they have an immediate and desperate need. If an interview goes well, they want you to start Monday. Keep track of the folks who aren’t hiring now, but “maybe in 6 months if things go well.” Don’t plan around any particular job, but put out a few feelers and leave yourself a couple months wiggle room in your budget.

One strategic planning lesson I’ve learned by screwing it up a couple of times is: Do your travel first. I found that once I started interviewing - once I found a place I was interested in working for - I couldn’t leave town for any length of time for fear of missing out. Again, there’s usually a very narrow window for interviewing, and even phone interviews are hard to work when you’re a few time zones - let alone an ocean - away.

As for what you do with your time, that’s up to you. My general advice is: have a plan, but pace yourself. I left one job with big plans ahead of me. I had a whole list of projects and travel that I was going to charge into. After a month of flailing around trying to do everything, I was completely stressed out and miserable. If I’d wanted that, I could have stayed at my job. I finally just ditched it all and spent the rest of my time off just reading.

One of the lessons is that when you’re not working, every day is like Saturday. What do you do on Saturday? You spend it running errands, getting groceries, cooking, doing odd jobs around the house, etc. etc. When you’re not working, that sort of thing expands to fill the time available. You probably have a backlog of that kinda crap that you’ve been putting off; give yourself time to burn through some of it before you try to do serious work, or it’ll keep distracting you. Then learn to say no to it: batch up your errands like you would normally, rather than running out to the store every time you need something.

I’ve also found it instructive to see what I didn’t get done during a retirement; all those things I’d been telling myself I’d really like to do if I only had the time, and then still didn’t get around to in three months off. In some cases, the lesson is that I’m kind of a magpie: there are all sorts of things that sound neat, but which I don’t actually care enough about to spend time on. I’ve learned to be more critical of what I put on my to-do list. Most of the time, though, the lesson is that I’m horrible about procrastinating. Having more time actually makes it easier to put things off, because I know I really do have plenty of time later. Then there’s a sudden flurry of interviewing, and I find myself back at work without having done them.

So having a plan and being organized and disciplined are more important when I’m spending time on personal projects and growth. If I want to get anything done, I really need to have my act together in a GTD kind of way. For work and family things, I’ve got external structure to keep me on track. If there’s something I have to do for work, it’s because there’s someone who wants it done, and will get on my case if I don’t do it. With personal projects, I need to prioritize, weed out the someday/maybe projects, and know my next actions. If I wake up every morning and wonder what to do today, I’ll never make progress, and I’ll get all stressed out.