I am presently 7 days away from retiring from a full time career as a scientific researcher. A commute (pre/post pandemic anyway), business hours, institutional red tape, multiple simultaneous projects conducted with a dozen different people at any given time, publishing articles in medical journals, a solid salary, health insurance. All the good and all the bad of my first career, done-zo. Time freedom.
Though I deeply appreciate all the good I gained and experienced in my 11 years since earning my PhD, I now find myself counting down the days to walk away. I am ready for a major shift. Seeing that we’re not planning on having any more babies, upending my working life seemed to be the next best choice, right? 😉
What's In This Post
Wasted time
But counting down the days, crossing off the squares on the paper calendar on my desk. Meanwhile, I’m also wishfully counting down the days (have been for a year now) when COVID cases in our county will fall to a case rate at or below the estimated case rate when we pulled out of normal life in March 2020. (Yes, I am still a data nerd). It seems insane!
With achieving time freedom having been one of my top priorities in making this life change. With time being the most precious limited resource any of us has. To effectively wish it away, counting it down… it feels so backwards.
But that’s honestly where I am today. I’ll push myself through my to-do lists for now. But starting a week from now, it’s a whole new game. Freedom means there’s only one person in charge of success or failure. (yikes) Time to have a plan!
Planning the new future
The financial freedom plan enabling this major career and life shift was always more clear to me. It’s math. Looking forward, I have projected out the financial plan for this new life for the next 18 months.
The time plan… that’s another story. Many pages of my personal notebook are scribbled with random new ideas for how to construct my days. How to take advantage of the time freedom of working for myself, protecting time to grow my online business and other business concepts, how much to adjust or not the kids’ schedules, building intentional routines, investing time in the neglected areas of my life or new areas where I’d like to grow, learning how to take some free time to just chill. But those doodles seem to change every time I doodle. They don’t have the mathematical simplicity of mapping out the money.
A familiar process
However, what has brought me some peace is settling on taking the same process approach to reorganizing my time that I’ve taken for 10+ years for managing our money: Lay a solid foundation. Break it into buckets. Optimize from there. It doesn’t have to be perfect overnight.
Sometimes money is wasted, sometimes time is wasted. But we can’t waste more of either sweating it.
So, while I don’t have all the answers for how to best construct my new days, I do have a process to follow.
Observe & record
Step 1 in Operation Figure Out New Life is to observe and record the data. Meaning, I will still get in the shower by 7:00 and march through the same family morning routine. Even though we’re getting towards summer, I’ll keep up the pattern of guiding my son through his morning tasks and homeschool activities, along with welcoming in our part time daycare dog (and managing the associated canine shenanigans that ensue). I will go about my day of the multitude of this and that which need to be accomplished.
BUT I will do so while tracking my time for a week or two. This way, I will identify (and quantify) what’s filling my days to objectively observe what’s getting done when and how much time I spend doing it. This is the equivalent of knowing your numbers for financial organization. It’s about bringing the various pieces together, and getting real about where you’re at.
From this practice you can learn a lot, allowing you to think about planning your time more realistically. Do I spend 5 hours on a new blog post or 8? Do I waste 2 hours a day or 1 analyzing web traffic statistics? Will it take me 10 hours or 40 to outline a grant proposal for a client? Am I more effective at certain tasks in the morning or afternoon? Is my son more effective with school tasks in the morning or afternoon?
If you don’t define it, you can’t change it. So collect the data I shall. I’ve tracked time before using (no surprise) a spreadsheet (a full FAQ here if you’re interested in trying it out!). So I’ll do the same thing again. It will look very different than when I tracked back in 2017 with a commute, office job, and a nursing baby!
Put stuff in buckets
Step 2 is to identify some general buckets to organize around. For money, I organize around four buckets of money outflow from income: fixed expenses, savings, debt, and spending. Each one gives you a place to focus your attention and make tweaks, without getting overwhelmed. As for managing time, I’ll save myself the analysis paralysis of ideal bucket determination and utilize the buckets put forward by time guru Laura Vanderkam. She uses these categories in planning her weekly to-do lists. They will work well to organize my brain around what to optimize first, next, etc. while curating my new time freedom. The buckets are simply career, relationships, and self. Because my son is at home and we’re homeschooling for the foreseeable future at this point, I’ll add one more dedicated category for kids/homeschool to consider time doing activities focused there as well.
So there we have it, four buckets: career, relationships, self, kids/homeschool.
Update from a new point of view
Next in this process will be to do a fresh personal and family vision exercise. I will simply revisit my most recent vision exercise and update how I see things based on where I now am. And ultimately reassess what to prioritize next. One thing at a time.
The End… and The Beginning
Goodbye PTO. Hello wide open future.
As you can see, reaching this point, to achieve time freedom is really just the beginning. Now the new work starts to achieve something greater with that time freedom.
But I can lean on a familiar process: Observe and define a foundation. Set the direction. Continually reassess and refine.
It will undoubtedly be an unending, imperfect road to manage my time optimally. To be effective and balanced in all spheres of life- the holy grail, right?! But the trick to rest easier isn’t so much about having it all figured out, but simply having a sense of where I’m at now and where I’m going.
With no one else dictating how I spend my time, having a clear direction will be critical to prioritize the steps on the path appropriately. And to effectively move forward living more intentionally. Because at any moment in time you’re either moving closer to or further from any particular goal. To me, it’s going in the direction you mean for yourself that counts more so than the arrival at any given point.
I’ll keep you posted on how a day in the life evolves. The struggles, the wins. Stay tuned.
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