My Next Chapter: A Retirement Journey - Six Working Days Left!

I just finished a paid vacation week for the very last time (as far as I know).

Now, I only have six more working days left before I retire! I know this intellectually – I’ve even been tracking on an online countdown calendar (JavaScript code written by Anthropic’s Claude generative AI chatbot). But in my gut, it still doesn’t seem real.

Part of the reason I can’t fully wrap my head around how little time I have left on the job is that I’m super busy at work. I feel noticeably less stressed on my time off, but almost as stressed as usual on workdays. It’s odd. When I’m off, I can step back and realize that soon none of this will remain on my to-do list. But while on the job, I’m still fully immersed.

Somehow I’d imagined my last few weeks before retiring would mostly be spent on “handover”, doing things like documenting what I do and training others on my most important tasks, with a lot less regular work. HAHAHAHAHA. I’m not sure exactly who I thought would be doing all my usual work in this fantasy of gradual phase-out. Most people I know don’t have a lot of spare time at work to take on someone else’s job in addition to their own.

The takeaway: If you want a mellow pre-retirement wind-down, you might need to give more than two months notice. In theory, maybe four months would give your employer time to look for and hire a replacement? Six? Then perhaps you could be involved in training the new staffer? However, there’s no guarantee that your position will be replaced before you leave – or replaced at all – even then. And not everyone wants to drag out an official pre-retirement plan that long. I certainly didn’t.

Meanwhile, I ping-pong between super mellow time off and intense work life. On my days off, I test out what retirement might be like with a much more relaxed pace than my past vacation time. I’m no longer worried about cramming plans into every day because time away from work is so scarce. On my working days, I race to finish as much of my to-do list as is feasible.

So, it’s back to work tomorrow after a week of lounging in the yard, reading a few novels, seeing some family & friends, and taking an overnight trip to the beach. It’s the last time I’ll return to a full-time job after a vacation week. There will only be six more days of work – Monday through Wednesday for the next two weeks – before the end of my full-time paid career.