Twenty or Five
Twenty or Five
I wasn’t cut out for retirement. It never suited me economically or emotionally. I am not ready to leave the accumulation phase. It kills me to say this. I have enough if calculated by even the most conservative of methods. I feel like I have a relative abundance of free time, and fuel to fire my household needs. Yet, work still feels part of my meaning and purpose. It still helps me connect with a community of people that I enjoy and am enriched by. For these reasons, leaving the workforce was never in the cards for me. Instead, I generally adhere to the twenty or five rule.
Most work is enjoyable and worthwhile if done for no more than twenty hours a week or five hours a day. It’s that simple. Want to enjoy your job and have the luxury of economic security?
Limit your hours.
Twenty
I may be in the minority when I say this, but there are enough hours in the week. That doesn’t mean that the months don’t seem to fly by. More accurately, I have more hours than things to do in any given seven day period.
I fill this time with pleasure. I read, on average, at least one book a week. I watch a few hours of television every night. I walk my kids to school many days, and work out in some form or another every afternoon. And I do this all while working twenty hours a week.
If I left my hospice job, I don’t know what I would do with myself. Or better yet, I know exactly what I would do with myself. I probably would start some new project or another that would eventually become a money making venture. I would create another job.
Why bother? Why not just stick with the perfect job I already have? By limiting myself to twenty or five, I have relieved myself of this burden.
Five
Even when you love your work, it can be exhausting. Especially when started before dawn and abandoned sometime after dusk. Almost any job is manageable, or even pleasant, if done for half a day. For me it is five hours.
After five hours of working on one task in any given day, I am done. I have no interest in going further. I might be excited to pick up the ball again tomorrow, but for today I’m finished.
I think most jobs are like this. Thus, I try to limit myself to working a maximum of five hours a day. It’s not perfect. Occasionally my hospice meetings go late. From time to time, I get a ton of phone calls after a particularly long day.
In general, however, I am happiest when I stick to this schedule. Twenty or five, but no more.
Traditional Retirement?
I may choose traditional retirement one day. I may extirpate myself from this twenty or five existence. I have that freedom in the future. My bet, however, is that it won’t be for a decade or two.
As discussed before, work provides all sorts of benefits. It let’s me avoid leaving the accumulation phase, and thus I can bypass both black and white swan events. It keeps my mind actively engaged, and allows for both learning and socialization on a daily basis.
And I can hold on to my identity as a doctor. Maybe it is no longer the predominant lens in which I see myself, but it still adds shade and color. I still want to help people.
Final Thoughts
I don’t choose retirement. I choose work on my own terms. Twenty or five. The key to being financially independent, productive, and content all at the same time.
I don’t feel like I need more hours. I need purpose, identity, and connection.
Work fulfills some of that for me.
Sounds like you have settled into the perfect work – life balance for you! Kudos on that!
I 100% like this model and find myself at this point in my life, striving for the same balance.
For me, I am coming from the other direction, adding meaningful work back into the mix.
The traditional notion of retirement , automatic stop at a specific age is changing.
There’s a lot more flexibility and options.
A lot more flexibility and opportunity to jump back in as we see fit.
I do think a lot of physicians can practice indefinitely if they reduce their hours to a 3 day work week, which brings the total to 24 hours. I know I certainly could as the days off would more than recharge me for the next set.
I used to think cutting down to 4 days a week would be enough but I do sometimes feel burned out especially on certain modalities I’m reading.
I really do think twenty hours a week is near close to perfect.
I went a little more extreme, I work closer to eight hours a week spread across a couple or sometimes three days. But to be fair I chair a college board and a large foundation board and remain active with my old university engineering department so if you put those unpaid “jobs” with my eight hours of paid consulting I might be pretty close to twenty hours of stuff that feels like work. I agree, I’d struggle to fill all those hours if I wasn’t doing things that mattered to me and I agree that by making an income that keeps my withdrawal rate at zero I feel totally secure financially. At some point I suspect we will both stop paid work, me sooner because I’m older, but eventually you probably will too. I wonder if we will both struggle with the point in time we start withdrawing continually from our investments? I think I will. Which is crazy when we have more than enough. But I’m crazy a lot of the time.
I think I will struggle too. We like to see things go up, not down!