Learning to work with the way I am
The main message is to recognise long-standing patterns, understand what your work life quietly provided, and learn to organise retirement around the person you actually are.
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Retirement gives you something you have probably spent much of your working life looking forward to: more control over your own time.
What it does not necessarily give you is a clear idea of how to use it.
That has been one of the more interesting discoveries of my retirement. I have plenty of things I want to do. Photography, writing, developing the website, learning new things, working on personal projects and all the everyday jobs that come with life.
The problem is rarely finding something to do!!
Sometimes it is deciding what to do, starting it, sticking with it and actually finishing it.
I can spend hours absorbed in something that interests me, yet struggle to start a simple job that should take five minutes. I can plan a project, work through its problems and see exactly how it could come together. Then, somewhere before the finish, my enthusiasm disappears.
For years I regarded things like that as simply part of my personality.
Recently, though, I have started looking at them rather differently.
Looking backwards
For most of my life, I have known that there are certain things about me that are a little different.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing that stopped me from having a career, family or perfectly normal life. It was simply part of being me.
As a child, I was quiet and could disappear into my own little world. Like many naturally reserved children, I was encouraged to come out of my shell and join in more.
But joining in did not always come naturally.
I could be sensitive to criticism and rejection, sometimes taking things far more personally than perhaps they were intended. Retreating into my own space could feel easier than figuring out where I fit among other people.
I did well enough at school. I behaved myself and passed exams. No obvious problem demanded attention.
There were simply characteristics that everyone, including me, accepted as being part of who I was.
Much later, quite accidentally, I came across somebody describing experiences from their own life that sounded remarkably familiar. They were of a similar age to me and from a similar life and work background, and they happened to have been diagnosed with ADHD later in life.
That caught my attention because my understanding of ADHD had been fairly stereotypical. I associated it mainly with children who could not sit still, struggled at school or constantly got into trouble. That certainly was not how I remembered myself.
But some of the experiences being described made me think.
Hang on. I do that.
Then another description sounded familiar.
And another.
It encouraged me to read more, but what became interesting was not whether I could attach a particular label to myself. It was that I had unexpectedly found another way of looking at behaviours I had known about for decades.
Not everything fitted. Other explanations are possible. I have never had a formal assessment; I am not looking for one, and I am not trying to diagnose myself.
What interested me was something much simpler.
Looking back through a different lens was helping me understand myself.
I have always liked solving the puzzle
One characteristic stands out more than almost anything else.
I love solving problems.
Give me something complicated to investigate, and I can become completely absorbed.
I want to understand why it does not work, experiment with different approaches and eventually find the answer.
My work life gave me plenty of opportunities to do exactly that.
I worked in IT for more than thirty years, moving through programming, systems analysis, development, support, service improvement and quality management.
The roles changed, but the part that interested me remained surprisingly consistent.
There was a problem.
I wanted to solve it.
Programming was a particularly obvious example. Something failed and I had to discover why. A system needed to do something new and I had to work out how to make it happen.
Once I had solved the problem, however, something changed.
The interesting part was over.
The remaining work might still be important, but the uncertainty had disappeared. What had been an intriguing puzzle yesterday could suddenly become routine implementation today.
Fortunately, work contained something I did not fully appreciate at the time.
Other people.
What work quietly provided
During my working life, there was always a structure around me.
Colleagues, deadlines, meetings, project plans, and people were always waiting for something I needed to produce. Even when a task did not particularly interest me, there was usually a reason to get it done.
Someone needed the result.
Another piece of work depended on it.
There was an external framework keeping things moving.
I did not have to manufacture all that motivation myself.
There were also people whose strengths complemented mine. I could investigate a problem, devise a solution or put together a plan. Other people could take responsibility for elements of its implementation, administration and completion.
At the time, I thought that was simply how organisations worked.
Only after retiring did I realise how much that structure had supported the way I worked.
Because retirement quietly removed it.
If I start a project now, my workforce is me.
I come up with the idea.
I research it.
I plan it.
I solve the interesting problems.
Then I also have to complete the routine bits, administer everything and finish the final twenty per cent after the challenge that attracted me has disappeared.
That final part can be surprisingly difficult.
When freedom exposes the pattern
Photography illustrates it perfectly.
I can spend hours developing an image, researching a location, working out lighting or thinking through an idea. Something to discover and a result I want to see.
Meanwhile, an email requiring a ten-minute reply can remain untouched.
A form needs completing.
Some paperwork needs sorting.
A small administrative job sits patiently waiting while something much more interesting repeatedly jumps the queue.
From the outside, that could look like choosing the enjoyable thing instead of the boring one.
Sometimes that is exactly what it is.
But I have become interested in why the difference in my response can be so large.
Why can I concentrate intensely on something difficult for hours, yet have to push myself to begin something simple?
I don't have a definitive answer, and I am wary of pretending every behaviour needs a medical explanation.
What I do have is a better understanding of the pattern.
And that turns out to be useful.
Understanding is not an excuse
Understanding why I might behave in a particular way does not remove responsibility for what I do.
If I fail to reply to somebody, they still experience the silence.
If I forget something important, it still matters.
If I say I am going to do something, recognising why I struggled to complete it does not magically finish the job.
What changes is the conversation I have with myself.
Instead of repeatedly asking, "Why do I keep doing this?", I can ask more useful questions.
Was the task too vague?
Was I trying to do too much?
Had the interesting part of the project finished?
Was something new distracting me from completing something old?
Did I simply need a reminder?
Those questions give me something I can actually work with.
Four things that are helping
None of the practical changes I am making require a diagnosis or complicated productivity system.
In fact, complicated systems are probably the last thing I need. I would only turn designing the system into another interesting project.
Four relatively simple ideas seem to make the biggest difference.
1. Break the job into smaller steps
"Sort out the paperwork" is not really an instruction. It is a vague description of an entire problem.
"Open the laptop. Find the document. Log in. Complete the first section" gives me somewhere to start.
Once I begin, continuing is usually easier.
The useful question is: what is the smallest action that would move this forward?
2. Keep the list shorter
A long list does not necessarily make me more productive.
It gives me more opportunities to choose whichever task happens to interest me most.
A shorter list forces me to decide what actually matters and reduces the number of things competing for attention.
I am learning that there is a limit to how many things I can meaningfully move forward at once.
3. Use reminders instead of relying on memory
Being able to concentrate deeply on a complicated problem does not mean I will remember every small task, message or appointment.
When something interesting occupies my attention, other things can disappear from view.
Reminders give those things somewhere to live outside my head.
That is not a failure of memory. It is simply sensible use of the tools available to me.
4. Allow some ideas to remain ideas
This may be the most liberating change.
Having a good idea does not mean I have entered into a contract to complete it.
I am allowed to enjoy thinking about something without immediately turning it into another project.
Some ideas will develop.
Others can remain ideas.
If every interesting thought becomes a commitment, it is hardly surprising when the backlog becomes overwhelming.
What I want retirement to feel like
Retirement has given me something I did not have during most of my working life: the freedom to arrange more of my life around the way I naturally work.
That does not mean abandoning responsibility.
I still want to finish things. I still want to be dependable. I still want to make progress.
But I no longer think the answer is constantly trying to force myself into somebody else's idea of productivity.
There will probably always be a difference between how I respond to an interesting problem and how I respond to a dull chore.
I can work with that rather than being surprised by it.
I can build systems around the things I struggle with, make better use of the things I am naturally good at and be more selective about which ideas deserve my time.
Perhaps one of the real freedoms of retirement is being able to stop assuming I ought to work a certain way and instead pay attention to what actually helps me move forward.
I've spent more than sixty years becoming quite good at being me.
I may now understand a little more about how that particular version of me works.
For the moment, I think that's enough.
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