How to Decide What to Do Next When You're Retired: Put Your Time and Energy Where Your Values Are

What do you want to do with the freedom that comes with retirement? It’s up to you. Yes, we may have less energy as we get older, but how can we make sure we’re using what we have on what matters to us? While many books address financial planning and some help us spend our savings, there isn’t much to help retirees decide what to do when we get up in the morning.

How to Decide What to Do Next When You’re Retired provides accessible, easy to use ways to figure out how to spend time on the things that matter. Through discussion, questions, examples, and worksheets, you will discover ways to:

• uncover your own personal meaning and values
• plan for each stage of retirement
• consider the potential obstacles of aging
• identify your personal goals and directions
• create helpful habits
• plan balanced days and weeks
• recognize and appreciate your accomplishments
• build both consistency and flexibility into your planning

The sections can be used together or separately, so you can use those tools that best fit your situation and personal style.

If you are avoiding thinking about what’s coming in retirement, this material can be a game-changer. It gives you real control over how you use your time and energy resources. It changes the sense of impending loss into time filled with meaning and purpose that’s adapted to the real limitations of aging. Your retirement is in your hands, and these tools are here to help you make it what you want it to be.

Jean Risley has been a programmer, a team leader for software development projects, a management consultant, and a minister. When she finally retired she had to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. She developed the tools in How to Decide What to Do Next When You're Retired to help decide what to do with all of the new freedom that came with retirement.

At retirement age, she has learned what it felt like to have less energy, senior moments, aches and pains, and medical surprises. Using these tools, she discovered that it's possible to make provisions for the effects of aging and still build a life that's purposeful, enjoyable, and grounded in personal choices.

This way of thinking is based on her many years of experience during her active careers, encouraging the professional and spiritual lives of people in her care. The approach she developed to organize her own life turned out to be helpful for the many different ways those around her were thinking about (and avoiding thinking about) their own retirement.