Pre-retirement downshifting: seize opportunities and create work flexibilities

And another of my musings on retirement.

People who know me have commented that I have planned my retirement rather well by downshifting over the last ten years: this notice comes from the International Downshifting Week website - links to downshifting below.

In my mid-fifties, I left my fairly high-powered job as professor and head of a university department to work in a hospice. After five years, one of my pensions became due and I went part-time in a less managerial job. Several academic contracts and other bits of work in fact came along to maintain the two days a week of income that I lost. Finally, I retired fully a month or two ago, when my state pension and other pensions fall due. And I still have some writing contracts and other occasional jobs to bring in some extra money for a while. A series of downshifts to increasingly less pressurised roles; just the right thing to do as you come to retirement – take it in easy stages.

People tend to think of academic jobs as a life in a holiday camp, anyway. Unfairly I rather think, but they are flexible, so you’re not going to be dying young because you don’t have control over your work life. The research says that the less control you have over your work life, the more stressed you will be and the younger you will die.

It’s all a bit of a misconstruction of my motivations; my planning leaves a lot to be desired. I actually left the university job when my wife moved to London to take up a new job. I have been doing it for too long and was feeling jaded, so took the chance of a change back to management and practice. The experience gave me a lot of new material for my writing. Then the downshift to part-time came really because the chief executive needed to find a job for someone who was ready to move up, so it was a chance for a bit of organisational succession planning, fortuitously available. Also, I suspect, when she realised I was going to do consultancies and writing about our field of work, she took the Lyndon Baines Johnson option.  He was an American vice-president of the 1960s, of whom a famous comment was made. The implication is that there’s a bit more control for a manager having me inside the tent excreting in an external direction than outside…you know the rest.

So rather than plan, I’ve seized opportunities when I could. But I suppose you could say that’s a form of planning. And it’s also important to have bits of work that you can do flexibly – that’s not an opportunity that many people have.

Link to International Downshifting Week.

Link to the Downshifter UK website - lots of good advice.

Link to Notes from the Frugal Trenches blog - interesting blog on downshifting in all sorts of ways, not just reducing your work, but reducing your demands on the environment.