While a lot of people want a soft transition from whatever their career was to their retirement life, I don't. I'm not sure why. I loved what I did for a career -- all my roles from academic researcher to UX practitioner to programmer. When I considered retiring eight years ago, the main reason I didn't was that I was having trouble imagining not doing what I did every day (even though at the time, I was sure I wanted to leave the job I had). I had lots of ideas of how to do things in a pro bono capacity (many of which I am still aware of, though I think that now more of them would actually come up with at least some sort of payment). But this time around, I'm ready to move on. I have such a long list of things I plan to do, and I'm not making fast enough progress on them (in my mind), but I still get sucked into things that relate to my professional life.
Right now I am: working on a short article about an interesting methodological 'incident', making final changes to a book chapter, reading the reviews of a rejected conference paper and deciding if there is any value in rewriting it for a different conference, advising a couple of colleagues who have come to me asking what to do in their current job or what to do in their career, writing some code that will go in the mailman3 open source project, and starting a new electronic community. I just finished doing a review of a new book for the publisher and in the early spring I reviewed a journal article. That doesn't count several projects I have turned down.
Had I not made it clear to people that I wasn't just retiring to work part time or work pro bono, there would be several more projects on my plate, more on the practitioner side than the researchy things that dominate the list above. I'm sure this varies as a function of what one's area is, but I also think that this would be true of any area where consultants are common. My father retired 30 years ago as an OSHA safety engineer (about as different as you can get from my career) and had a similar experience. Of course, unless you really take a consulting career seriously, your expertise decays pretty fast in this day and age, and for him, at least, the opportunities went away in about 3 years (he wasn't trying at all to keep his knowledge up to date). I hope it's faster for me.
I do enjoy these projects, though they tend to engender more guilt (and more date-driven deadlines) than most of my other projects, which is one of the things I want to get away from. Maybe I do want this professional identity to stick around more than I publicly admit. Or maybe I just can't say no....
No comments:
Post a Comment