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Designing Your Retirement

Daydreaming about the future

People usually think of daydreaming as a waste of time, a lazy interlude between periods of “productive” work. This is especially true of professionals who revere rational thinking above all else. But taking a break from work and letting your mind wander freely for a while can benefit your well-being and re-energize your brain. Daydreaming can enhance your creativity, keep you moving forward, build your resilience, and give you hope as you face life’s challenges. Visualizing a desirable future can be valuable at any time, but it is especially worthwhile at the point in your career when you start to think about winding down your practice and wonder what might come next. Daydreaming can help you figure that out.

Most daydreaming is unintentional, as when you find yourself doodling without being aware of it. But it can also be deliberate, as when you close your eyes and try to envision various scenarios for your life after practice. Those scenarios might be realistic or wishful, practical or fanciful; it doesn’t matter. Giving in to your imagination enables you to conjure up new and often dazzling insights, ideas and possibilities.

One place to start expanding your imagination and envisioning future possibilities is my book, Retirement by Design. Named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best retirement books of 2020, it is a workbook filled with guidance, exercises and tools to help you…

I have such exciting news to share with you! The Wall Street Journal selected my book, Retirement by Design, as one the six best books of 2020 on aging and retirement! As an author, I’m always happy to get a good review, but this was an unexpected and thrilling honor. And I’m deeply grateful that the WSJ, and my readers, are finding value in this book.

The reader feedback I receive shows that, after so many months of the pandemic, many people, young and old, are contemplating what retirement means, when it happens, and how it might look. The very concept of retirement is being revolutionized. There is a growing awareness that the traditional linear career trajectory of education, then work and family, then retirement, is being replaced by individualized life and career patterns that might take any shape or direction. People may seek education, work, family, travel, volunteering, adventure, and retirement (permanent or temporary) at any point and in any order during their increasingly long lives. Fortunately, while more senior professionals may have the most immediate interest in the book, its creative, design-focused approach is adaptable enough to accommodate any career and retirement scenario.

The holidays are coming up fast. Retirement by Design would be a great gift to yourself if you are starting to think about retiring, or for any friend, family member or colleague who is (or should be). Its workbook format makes it highly…

I hope this finds you, your families and colleagues healthy and coping well while you shelter in place.

Many firms have asked me how to ensure that their mentoring programs and informal mentoring initiatives continue effectively while people are working remotely and facing so much uncertainty. If you have questions or could use some help with your mentoring efforts, feel free to contact me. Also, my recent article, Mentoring During a Pandemic, offers some simple advice for maintaining mentoring relationships.

The other area I have been concentrating on involves retirement planning. Now that you have been working from home for two months, are you reconsidering how much longer you expect to continue your practice? In a recent essay, Altman Weil consultant Jim Wilber described his thought process and imagined that other senior practitioners were also “recalculating their retirement horizon.” And it’s not just senior practitioners who are reassessing their priorities and career choices as a result of the pandemic. According to a study discussed in Fortune Magazine last month, 14% of women and 11% of men are considering quitting their jobs due to increasing work-family conflict.

If you are wondering what your future might look like, and how much longer you want to keep practicing, take a look at my recent article, “Is this the time to plan your retirement?” It presents a few basic questions to help you find some clarity about the things that are…