Tips for Time Management During Retirement
Written by TYE Medical on Nov 20th 2023
Retirement isn’t what it used to be if you’re one of many seniors with an active lifestyle. It’s not uncommon to choose semi-retirement or pursue side-gigs while balancing family, hobbies, and travel in your golden years. You might find yourself busier and more stressed than expected. At times it can even seem like you’re busier now than you were with a full-time career.
Having plenty of time on your hands can be as challenging to manage as not having enough, especially if you want to make the most of those days and years. What’s the solution? These time management tips can help you reach your goals and use your time to the fullest.
Leave Multitasking Behind
Many people feel they’re of greater worth and value when accomplishing something they perceive as meaningful. You think that if you’re busy you have more significance, which can make retirement a challenging time. You want your days to be full. You try to fill it with many tasks and then start multitasking to recreate that sense of accomplishment.
If you’re tempted to resort to multitasking–don’t! It’s actually undermining your accomplishment and sucking time away from your days. In reality, doing more than one thing at the same time only stresses your brain and makes you less efficient overall–regardless of how you feel.
Experts call this “cognitive overload” which creates chronic, low-level stress that eventually affects your health, especially as you approach your 40s and 50s. We have an emotional experience that says we’re productive, but it’s a façade. Multitasking is toxic to your brain, because you want to challenge your brain as you age and not overload it.
To exercise your mind and maintain brain health in your senior years, try learning new things and practice recall to improve your memory. For more information, check out our article, Are You Losing it? How to Boost Memory Power and Prevent Dementia.
List 100 Goals that Are Important to You
Take a breath. These goals can be a large bucket-list dream or a achieving a small but meaningful goal. What’s the point? It helps you see what is valuable to you–what matters. Then you know what you must prioritize in your life, especially when it comes to family and meaningful life accomplishments.
Without setting priorities, it’s easy to let yourself be overrun with tasks and caught up with things that really aren’t important (or even necessary) for you. A list of 100 meaningful things takes a lot of thought and reveals what matters most to you. Armed with these valuable priorities, you can begin to make conscious choices about how you spend your time and what you say “no” to.
Pace Yourself
Now you’ve made your list–but it’s not a race. Instead, use these priorities as a roadmap to how you want to spend your time during your retirement years. Besides, you don’t want to add stress to your life and turn your priority list into work.
Sometimes the best time management strategy is to pace yourself. Instead of diving in, make it a challenge to complete one of the items on your list every couple of weeks or every couple of months for the bigger items.
Regardless of your stage of life, it’s easy to squander time on what is trivial and mundane. Pacing yourself can help you prioritize more strategically.
Be Involved in Regular Activities
While you don’t want to major in the daily and trivial, you also don’t want to throw routine and structure out the window. Keeping a regular schedule that includes activities and socialization helps you stay productive and focused. It can also help you build relationships as you regularly see the same people and whether through church, volunteering, or hobbies. But make a point to include some regular activities in your schedule.
This of your retirement years as a time to explore new activities and people. It’s also a time to give back to the community.
Down Time Is a Time Management Skill
This is even true during retirement and goes along with pacing yourself. Don’t load up your week with commitments and requirements. Building leisure time into your days is crucial during retirement.
If you want your golden years to be about fulfillment and enjoying goodness in your life, you’ll need to slow down and block off some restorative time. Take a walk, day dream, nap, and maybe even do nothing sometimes. These are times of restoration for your body and mind. It is a time of rest. During these quiet and still times you can become acquainted with the needs of both your body and soul.
Keeping Your Life Balanced During Retirement
During these post-career years, the key is to strike a balance with your time management. You don’t want stress-filled days, pressure, and overly scheduled time. But on the other hand, you don’t want to squander this gift of time and never achieve valuable life goals, whether large or small. Implementing some of these tips can help you enjoy retirement while getting the most out of it.
