Slowing Down on the Path to Retirement
Editors note: This is part of our “Retirement” series to address challenges and opportunities many of our members facing retirement are experiencing.
My path to retirement has been a slow and gentle one.
I enjoy learning – I have degrees in Aerospace Engineering, History, and Information Studies – and, while I no longer want to invest the amount of time required to obtain another degree, I haven’t wanted to stop working and learning completely. To that end, I have treasured the wide variety of projects in which I have been involved over the past 30 or more years because they have often provided me with niche learning opportunities.
However, some years ago I realized that I could continue learning new things even while reducing the amount of time I was devoting to my business, so I made an effort to cut back my work to about 25 hours per week. That worked well for a number of years and also enabled me to spend more time with my father as he aged.
More recently, I realized that I was no longer enjoying the various open-ended projects where I was spending 10 or 15 hours per week each per client and repeating the same tasks over and over. In one case, the client experienced significant changes in management resulting in – at least from my perspective – unreasonable expectations regarding the ways in which they wanted me to work. It took a while – sometimes up to a year – before I realized that the enjoyment and learning opportunities had disappeared in those specific cases. Eventually, I “fired” each of those clients.
With the advent of the pandemic, my part-time work as an academic reference librarian became virtual, and I realized that this was also part of my path to semi-retirement. When the university switched to a hybrid version after a couple of years, I was no longer interested in investing time in commuting, and I decided to remove reference librarianship from my portfolio.
For the past two years, I have kept only a handful of long-term clients who provide me with occasional, short-term projects from which I still get those feelings of interest and fulfillment. There isn’t a lot of scope creep, we understand each other so that there are very few glitches in my ability to provide them with valued results, and they are dependable when it comes to payment.
Early in that period, several potential new clients found me through my website, and I did take on one new client because the topic of the project, aviation, interested me. However, there was a lot of scope creep; changes in company contacts and apparent goals occurred, and as a result I decided not to do any further work there. In fact, I decided not to take on any further new clients at all.
To help me keep to that decision, I have lined up a couple of colleagues to whom I can refer any projects that I don’t want to or don’t have time to work on.
So now I work no more than 30 hours per month, and often much less. My father is gone but I am able to visit my daughter regularly, meet up with friends and colleagues, take more care of myself through dance and fitness classes, travel with my partner, and spend time visiting family in England.
I still haven’t managed to read all the books that piled up over the years, though, but I’m working on it!
Gillian Clinton started Clinton Research, based in Toronto, Canada, in the early 1990s after being laid off from the Aerospace industry … TWICE! After meeting some AIIP members at one of the annual library conferences held in Toronto in the early 2000s, she joined the organization and has never looked back.
