I retire in 99 days. Yeah, I’m counting. and I’m finding myself not caring about anything at work. I should be celebrating these last three months, but I feel like I’m dragging my ass to the finish line.
It shouldn’t be like that. I have a good job (36 years there), work with good people, and do important work.
But it is a daily struggle to be engaged. I’ve got to fix my attitude. I don’t want to be viewed as someone who coasted, who checked out early.
I don’t know if there is any advice that will help, maybe I just needed to put this into words.
The way you’re feeling strikes me as 100% normal and acceptable. I don’t think you need to change your attitude at all.
You’re coming to the end of a significant period in your life, even a defining period. A chapter is ending and you’re not sure what the next chapter will be like. Of course you’re going to be a mixed bag of feelings-- anticipation, worry, some sadness, some “let’s get on with it.” There’s no way you’re going to be able to “engage” with the work the way you have up to now.
Cut yourself some slack, because this is a Big Change. You ARE coasting to the finish line, but you can still do the work in an honorable way even if your heart isn’t in it so much anymore.
I suggest you do your best to refrain from thinking about how you should be feeling and just observe and accept how you are feeling.
Yeah, at this point you should be showing your coworkers where your stuff is and what routines you perform.
I’m 62yo. I have not announced retirement be we all know it’s coming. So, I’m not taking on any big long term projects. In fact I’m urging others to replace/update my biggest project (a web site) with the new applications available. It’s going to probably retire with me.
Is the nature of your job such that you can work on a legacy, not your routine daily tasks?
e.g. Once I’d given my notice from my last IT job, I didn’t do any more of my normal day-to-day work. Couldn’t be arsed to mess with that irritating crap, the fake urgent deadlines, the mania, etc.
Instead I started writing a comprehensive “brain dump” of all the corporate knowledge accumulated in my head. Including the ever-elusive history that explains why something is the way it is now.
For me that was very cathartic. I’d been carrying a lot in my head that it felt good to put out. Not that I was writing a political hatchet job, but I was setting down a lot of trivia that I could then happily forget. And which the rest of the department could refer to later as the need arose.
I found myself so engaged in that task that by the last day I stayed late just to “finish” it. Which I did at least in terms of fleshing out every entry in the outline I’d started from. And I could have probably kept typing for another week improving my work and adding more details if I didn’t have to start the new job the next Monday.
My own retirement is now just a few months away. The nature of my current job has no similar opportunity for a brain dump, other than via an unofficial one-on-one mentoring process to the newer folks. Which I now find myself doing. Not out of a great love for my employer, but from a sense of respect for the career / profession itself.
You may find something here which resonates with you so you can end your career with head held high, not ruefully reviewing your all-too-human succumbing to temptation & sloth at the end.
Thanks, all. It’s weird because, when I would think about retirement when it was still years away, I never imagined I would be feeling anything other than incredible joy as the day neared. Mixed feelings? No way, I thought, I’ll be doing a jig out the door on my last day.
I definitely do not want to keep working, but some days I find myself thinking more about the (5%) negative aspects than the (95%) positive ones.
I know how you feel. I’m downloading to prepare people to succeed in my absence, and it’s gradually becoming more about caring for those people and less about performing for the company. I’m currently 2 hours into this work day, the first work day in 7 days, and I spent about 10 minutes actually working. And I do need to do some work, but it’s the kind of work that satisfies the company rules about various personal reimbursements, it’s not my usual heat transfer.
First of all, “mixed feelings” and “doing a jig out the door” aren’t in any way mutually exclusive.
Retirement itself is 100% coasting, from the point of view of the employer. Is it so unnatural to have a gradual element to it? I assume you’re not going to start volunteering at your old job when you retire. What you’re working on is adapting to the end of your career with them, I think.
I work with some wonderful friends. I love them. I want to be a positive for them. I feel close to zero commitment to the company, and think more about the various ways they mistreated or cheated me (though probably less than most companies do most employees) than I do about how great it is that the company grows into a shining city on a hill.
More info: I have not announced my retirement yet. Everyone thinks it is still a couple years away. This will come as a big blow to the team - not because I am any sort of all-star, but because we are a small, very close group and losing any one of us would have a huge impact. Also, there are a few major parts of the job that I currently manage alone that will have to be picked up.
Because of this, guilt is one of the things I am conscious of. I know, everyone says “you won’t be missed as much as you think you will/you are replaceable/ in a couple weeks they will get over it” etc. All of this is true, to some extent, but I know what a blow it would be if one of the others suddenly left. My leaving will definitely cause a disruption, at least in the short term.
Checking out 2 years before retirement is a problem. 99 days, not so much. After all, how much of what we do is going to pay off six months or a year down the road, and that kind of stuff you have no reason to care about any more.
Any reason you haven’t told anyone? When do you plan to? I don’t think many companies are nasty enough to get rid of someone retiring - versus switching jobs - early. It is not at all to their benefit.
But whether or not there is, if you care about the team you should start documenting stuff and trying to avoid commitments after your retirement date. (This might be tough.) Good managers have some kind of plan about what to do if any of their staff gets run over by a bus, but there aren’t that many good managers out there.
I’ve got about 15 calendar months to go and I’m trying to take a similar approach. My fellow subject specialists are significantly younger than me and though I’ll do the best work I can, I have now made my focus to be the best, most supportive coworker I can be.
Much of my work (supporting contract acquisition for large defence projects) will now start coming to fruition after my retirement date, which is kind of a weird feeling.
I haven’t told anyone because, in part, I’ve been struggling with how much notice to give. Most online “experts” say to give just two weeks. I’m not gonna do that. But I haven’t said anything yet because I don’t want to be making a big deal of it, talking about it all the time, fielding questions ("What are you going to do all day???"). I dunno, it’s complex.
Back when I had a year to go I decided on giving about 3 months notice. That feels right.
So I’m going to “come out” (as I call it to myself) in two weeks.
Before I retired I walked around my house and made notes on all the stuff I wanted or needed to do but hadn’t had time for, and then made a spreadsheet. When people asked me that question, I answered that I had a spreadsheet with 60 items. That shut them up.
I don’t think you actually have to make the spreadsheet for it to work.
As for when to tell, when you start thinking “I won’t have to go to that meeting, I’ll be gone” it will be time.
For me, it was very different. I decided to take early retirement about halfway through the term and I felt a strong obligation not to students to continue to give them full value. I had put in several months on a committee to chose a new director of the business school and I felt it unfair to leave them in the lurch and continued even after retirement until the final choice was made. And I continued to do research for nearly 20 years until I ran out of ideas. And I still might have a minor paper in me. And I continued to run my seminar for about 10 years. So I really didn’t disengage in any way. I have now, but it took 20 years.
I’ve always heard it referred to as “Short Timer’s Disease” (STD).
In my experience (both observing it and experiencing it), it manifests in one of two ways:
Frantically attempting to prepare the employer for their departure. Writing down as much info as possible, trying to tie up loose ends, trying to train a replacement, and so on.
Just not giving a crap about anything because what are they going to do, fire you?
I’ve really done both myself. Usually #1 but sometimes #2. Rarely though is it a situation where everything is normal. It’s almost always one or the other. And maybe it varies between the two. Maybe you frantically prepare and then once you feel like you’ve done enough, you coast. Or maybe you drag your feet until you realize how much of a mess you’re going to leave behind and then you try to make up for it.
Neither one is better than the other. You do you. One of the greatest things about STD is that you have all the power. When you’re leaving employment on your own terms, they are your terms and you get to decide how it is.
I retired May 6, 2022. I gave about 8 weeks official notice. My boss knew I would retire within the next year. Guess what. My boss didn’t care about me teaching the next in line. So I did my job and when my tasks were done, I sat on my ass. I worked for the corporation for 21 years. I cried a bit the day I walked out the door but after that, ah, freedom. Two weeks after I retired I went on a 17 day trip to England. Came back, spent some time in the ER with SVT, had a cardiac ablation August 10, and spent a month recovering. At no point did I ever wonder “did I do the right thing.” At no point did I miss going to work. I like my career (medical librarian) but I was DONE after 41 years of looking up stuff. I wasn’t tired of my job, I was tired of WORKING.
In US military speak that’s “FIGMO” pronounced like it’s spelled: “Fig” plus “moe”. Which is the initialism for “F**k it; got my orders”.
Meaning I’ve been given the paperwork sending me to my next duty station (or back to civilian life) and now I’m so over the work here. Your orders are generally generated ~2 months before your departure date and that last 60 days is a time of legendary sloth & who-cares attitudes.
