It seems like a good idea: Instead of going from full-time 40+ hours a week to zero hours cold turkey, I’ll taper down by working part time for a few months before retiring.
My company doesn’t have an official phase-out program for soon-to-be-retirees, and I envy friends who work at places which do. But I had enough post-pandemic-lockdown vacation saved up to be working only 3 or 4 days a week for a couple of months until my retirement date the end of July. I thought that would be better than going from full-steam to full stop.
However, while in theory that should be helping me wind down, in practice it often feels like a series of jolts between testing out my upcoming life of (relative) leisure and diving back into intense full-time work. It still takes awhile to stop thinking about work during a stretch of time off.
For example, one week last month. After two days with lots of meetings, data project, and problem-solving, Wednesday started a stretch of five days off (the Juneteenth holiday, two vacation days, and the regular weekend). But I’m not in my New Chapter quite yet, even though my upcoming retirement is pretty much always in my thoughts. This wasn’t a “real” vacation, like one I took the week before in New York and Maine. Getting away has always been the easiest way for me to stop thinking about work tasks, but I couldn’t do that every week for two months. Instead, there are just a bunch of pauses before I get back to trying to finish up data projects at work.
I know I shouldn’t complain – I’m very lucky to have this time off, especially in the summer. But it still feels kind of odd. Not yet retired, starting to disengage (why it’s different from usual time off), but still with a full plate of things to do at work.
I don’t know what might have been better than two months of working a few days a week, though. Maybe working part-time days instead of part-time weeks, so the work days weren’t so long and intense? But then I’d be trying to cram things into short days, without stretches of time long enough to concentrate on problem solving and coding.
The bottom line: If like me you’ve worked someplace a long time and care about leaving things in good shape for your co-workers, winding down may be harder than you expect.
(Separately, I regret not spending some of my saved vacation days on extending pre-pandemic trips we took to Europe, instead of a pre-retirement wind-down when I’ll soon have lots more time off anyway . . . . but who knew?)
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