When Retirement Plans Meet Real Life: The Challenge of Protecting Creative Momentum

One of the things I've discovered about retirement is that having more control over your time doesn't necessarily mean you get to spend that time doing what you planned.

Over the past few weeks, I've had a fairly simple list of things I wanted to get done.

• Finish sorting out my photography studio.

• Get back to taking photographs.

• Do some writing.

• Spend time in the garden.

Generally get back to some of the things retirement was supposed to give me more time for.

It hasn't quite worked out like that.

There are still the normal things at home to be done, and my responsibilities helping to look after my elderly mother-in-law who has dementia. Our dog Toby has also needed increasing amounts of attention, as he is unwell and nearing the end of his life, particularly first thing in the morning and during the night.

None of those things is unimportant.

So I'm not suggesting that I should simply ignore everybody else and disappear into my studio whenever I feel like it. So of course sometimes my plans have to be sacrificed for the benefit of other people. Not to accept that would be selfish.

A lot of my time recently has gone into helping my wife Adele prepare for a fairly major change in her driving school business. This has been a distraction, but a welcome one. She is moving from teaching manual gearboxes to teaching in an automatic Toyota Yaris, which has involved far more work behind the scenes than simply buying another car.

There have been logos to redesign, new colour schemes and branding styles to design, magnetic signs and a roof box to organise, updated information for pupils to produce, the car itself to set up, and all sorts of practical jobs that nobody really notices until they need doing. I have actually enjoyed the creative challenge of this work, and then there is her website to update, something that was not in my immediate plans but which I am now keen to progress as soon as possible.

But when plans and activities have to change, I'm beginning to wonder what actually happens to the creative spark that started them initially. For me, changing a plan isn't always as simple as moving something from Tuesday to Wednesday. When I get an idea, my instinct is to follow it. I start thinking about what it could become, and then I want to work through it until I reach some sort of conclusion.

There's a momentum to it. That momentum matters.

Interrupt the momentum at the wrong point, and I don't necessarily pick up where I left off. Sometimes the creative spark has gone. What seemed exciting yesterday has become another unfinished job today.

And I've had plenty of ideas over the years that have disappeared that way.

That's why I can get frustrated when a day I'd set aside for something suddenly becomes a day doing something completely different. It isn't simply that I've lost a few hours. Sometimes it feels as though I've lost control of the goal itself.

The studio has been a good example recently. I've had several days when I've intended to finish improvement jobs in there. On one Sunday I had the tools ready and fully intended to get on with it. By the end of the day, the tools were still exactly where I'd left them.

Instead, I'd spent the day on other important jobs at home. It wasn't a wasted day. Far from it. The jobs needed doing, and we made real progress. But the studio didn't simply move to another day. The momentum disappeared with it.

That leaves me with a question I'm finding surprisingly difficult to answer.

Is the problem that I allow my own plans to be sacrificed too easily? Or am I simply making too many plans?

I have no shortage of ideas. Photography projects, writing, the blog, the studio, gardening, AI experiments and various other things regularly appear on my mental list of things I'd like to do.

Perhaps I'm trying to fit more into retirement than retirement actually has room for.

That's an uncomfortable possibility.

A few weeks ago I wrote something in my journal that has stuck with me: ‘stop trying to manage retirement like a project and give myself permission to live it instead’.

I'm still not sure I've cracked that one.

Because there's another side to this. Ideas and projects aren't simply jobs to me. They're part of what makes life interesting. I don't particularly want to solve the problem by becoming less curious, having fewer ideas or deciding that nothing matters enough to pursue.

So where is the balance?

How do you decide whether other commitments are taking too much of your time, or whether you're simply expecting too much from the time you've got?

How do you protect enough space to follow an idea while accepting that real life will occasionally interrupt it?

And how do you know which ideas deserve protecting in the first place?

I don't have a neat answer.

Perhaps there isn't one.

But I am beginning to think I need to become better at distinguishing between the things I genuinely want to pursue and the things I've simply added to another list.

Because if everything is a priority, nothing really is.

And perhaps protecting my ‘creative momentum’ doesn't mean protecting every plan I make.

Maybe it means being much more careful about deciding which plans are important enough to protect.