My Next Chapter: A Retirement Journey

Thanks for stopping by! I’m Sharon Machlis, and I started this blog shortly before my planned retirement to document my journey from decades of full-time work to my next chapter. Come along for the journey! I hope to share lots of discoveries in this new phase of life. I’m also likely to talk about issues of ageism in our (American) society.

In my previous “work life” chapter, I began my career as a daily newspaper reporter but soon transitioned to focus on business journalism. I spent most of my reporting career covering technology. The last few years I moved into a data analysis/data science role as Director of Editorial Data & Analytics for Foundry (formerly IDG Communications, publisher of Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld and others) but still found time to continue writing. I also authored the book Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism.

I’ve been honored to receive several awards over the years, including a prestigious Neal Award for “Best Instructional Content” (business-to-business journalism, 2023), Azbee National Gold Awards for Impact/Investigative Online Excellence (2014) and Web How-To Articles (2014 and 2017), and the Digital Analytics Association’s Top Practitioner Quantie Award (2021).

Some of my work interests are also personal interests. However, I no longer want to be defined primarily by my professional bio. Those have never been all of who I am – even though it’s largely what I’ve presented on social media where people follow me for work-related reasons. Like you, I’m proud of things outside my professional life. And, probably also like you, many of my meaningful accomplishments have been outside of work.

I agree with Jeannine Holden, who told the New York Times: “Turns out that I’m not one of those people who is defined by their jobs; I just thought I was.”

If you follow me for tech-related reasons: I still like R and plan to work on hobby R projects in my retirement, as well as spend time on my new obsession with generative AI (requiring me to learn Python). I’ll keep posting about those topics on social media at Mastodon and LinkedIn. I also have a website focused more on my tech interests and projects at machlis.com, and a GitHub account.

But I also want to do things like get more serious about learning American Sign Language, go to the gym more, do fun tourist-at-home day trips, travel, see more of my family and friends, and lots more! And I’ll likely be posting about some of those, too.

I’ve got other hobbies, including photography, bicycling, running, crocheting, reading, and writing/blogging. I may get involved with some community groups. Who knows, maybe I’ll also get back to playing the piano and/or ham radio.

You can find me via email at NextChapter at machlis dot com as well as at Mastodon and LinkedIn.

My Next Chapter has an email newsletter and RSS feed in addition to this website.

This blog was created using the free, open-source Quarto publishing platform. You can find out more about Quarto at quarto.org. or Quarto and blogging specifically at Dr. Albert Rapp’s excellent The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Quarto Blog.