Spoiler Alert:  For those of you still in the workforce…when you retire, you schedule gets more difficult to manage…not easier.

Structured Time vs. Unstructured Time

Now that Thaddeus and I are both retired, our schedules are whatever we want them to be…kind of.

Obviously our schedules are determined by factors out of our control…weather, business hours, demands of family and friends…etc.

But having such an open, unstructured schedule makes it a bit more difficult to schedule time with others.  I can’t tell you how many times someone will ask, when are you available to chat…for coffee…to meet…etc.?  How do I respond to that?  I typically eat lunch at noon and a lighter meal at 6:00 pm.  I also have two weekly scheduled times I’m booked.

But who’s to say if I want to go to Costco on Thursday morning, or go on a bicycle ride on Monday afternoon because the weather is expected to be good, or pick up a book I have reserved at the library on Friday morning?

It was so much easier to schedule in others in my life when I had a block of structured, “unavailable time” due to work.

Don’t get me wrong…I don’t miss work even a little bit.  And I am getting more and more comfortable with an unstructured schedule.  But it kind of reminds me of when someone told me that when a goldfish is released from a confining little bowl into a larger tank of water, it will continue to swim within the confines the size of it’s old bowl (I don’t believe this is true, but I like the analogy none the less).

Current Knitting

With an unstructured schedule, you’d think I could at least make progress on my knitting.  Alas, with the demands of a cat in my lap, and getting to the end of a ball of yarn without another one wound and ready, I have done no knitting on the Silky Wool Cardigan sleeve since Monday.

I did do some additional work on the Knitted Sheet.

But you can see that is starting to progress much more slowly as it widens (as I predicted).