Setting Expectations: Retirement Edition
What’s the most common thread in conversations about the beginning of my retirement?It’s made up of three questions.
- Do you have travel plans?
- What are you going to do with your time?
- What am I going to do without you in real estate?
It is the middle question that I want to discuss today.
Assumption that my day has to be full
My days have been over-full for most of my adult life. I don’t need them full now.
What drove me to retirement is that my job gave other people the right to drop hours of work on me at random times. That’s the nature of real estate.
That was needed then, but not needed now. It was a type of multitasking: I was still chewing on a negotiation in progress when I was with friends and family. If the phone rang, it could be the listing agent with a counteroffer.
In these first two weeks, I have had more latitude to pay full attention to something, until I don’t want to anymore. As expected, I am getting more things done.
I went back to some good habits.
What’s important, what’s urgent?
In the 1990s, this was the big business book that everyone was talking about: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (I might reread it.)
The takeaway for me was the section about doing what is important instead of reacting to what is urgent. I have been doing this, more often than not, career-long. But I worked in an industry full of urgency. Now, I am rid of tons of urgency. My job now is to do what’s important.
Success one: An important thing to do was to unsubscribe to real estate information. For the past two weeks, I have unsubscribed from real estate thought leaders, property flyer senders, and most of the publications. I spent a few minutes every time I went into email to unsubscribe instead of deleting. What’s left now is mainly things I want to open and read. My email time has been cut dramatically; it happened rather quickly.
My husband is good at prioritizing rest. My style is to push through to the end of the task, then rest. I am suddenly in a life phase where there are significantly fewer hard deadlines. Being me, I will get everything done. This is the time to reevaluate what “everything” is.
Success two: I have consciously set long deadlines on the organizational tasks that are important, but not urgent. There are a lot of them: reorganize my computer files, reorganize the physical files, recycle or give away or throw away office items that I will not be using anymore. Then: remove one or two pieces of furniture that currently hold files, office equipment, books, and business swag. Then rearrange the home office so that it is primarily a playroom and not a work room.
Pre-retirement me would do this in two weeks, interrupted by what my clients and agents needed. Retirement me would like to see the computer files and physical files done by Groundhog’s Day.
I have been retired for 14 days, as of this writing. These are my answers to those three questions I started this post with:
- I just took a road trip to see family. That is quite enough for now. I do not intend to travel this winter.
- This is a moving target. Right now, I do not have extra free time. I have a great backlog of deferred tasks that I am now prioritizing.
- There’s a bit of my ego that likes to think that I am the only great buyer’s agent in Massachusetts (or America, or the world!) But, I know that is not true. I stopped working directly with clients in 2016. The company didn’t crash. There was enough training and supervision to keep up the standard of integrity. The agents that stayed on are fully able to keep up the standards I set. Talk to them; they are Rona-trained and wonderful people.