On Twitter now, God help me!

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When I was Reviews Editor of InfoWorld in the 80s, I would get a stack of (postal) mail literally three feet high, every morning. Obtaining an electric envelope-opener was a major convenience -- as was obtaining an assistant to actually do the work, since slicing open the envelopes was the half of it -- you had to remove the material from the envelope, unfold it (usually), and place it in the pile.

Then I'd go through the pile, throwing out the 60% irrelevant. Then go through the remainder again to sort into Useful/Interesting and Dunno Yet.

That took an hour each morning.

By mid-90s, I got almost no physical mail at all. I was editor-in-chief of SunWorld Online, so most relevant mail went to my editors; but communications were mostly through email. That meant about 100 relevant emails a day -- plus 200 or so spam messages. I had two dozen subfolders in my inbox to sort through it all and felt it was a great personal victory to sort my inbox down to under 100 active messages on any given day. (Of course, filed-away mail was often forgotten thereafter.)

I also subscribed to about two dozen magazines at work, mostly free trade and professional journals, which piled up in the corner with only an article or two read in each. At home I subscribed to another 18 or so computer magazines plus fun reading like Forbes and Wired. Never kept up on them either. By the year zero (2000), I had cancelled most pubs and was down to perhaps five.

I retired three years ago and the first thing I did was subscribe to The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, Now That I Finally Have Time to Read Them -- fatally innocent conceit!

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The WSJ, my favorite newspaper in the world, plus two local papers (the metro and the local), extended my breakfast to two hours each morning. I couldn't keep it up -- it was just too much. And The Economist--my god, what a labor that came to be! It covers all the topics you normally skip by or don't get much sense out of in the regular press -- especially what's going on in other countries -- and you *think * you can just skim through them and get a sense of what's going on in the rest of the world -- but you dip into *any* article and the high-quality writing and the depth of your ignorance combine to force you to read the whole article.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Since the magazine is 100 pages with not more than 10 pages of ads, that's 90 dense pages of text every week on MEGO subjects (Mine Eyes Glaze Over -- a Washington term for Very Important but Very Boring subject matter, like the Fed or Kazakhstan). It takes *hours* to read the thing. And while you're in the middle of reading it -- here comes another issue!

Tip for magazine publishers: A magazine whose main virtue is that you can skim through it quickly and toss it should not be dismissed. When I subscribed to all those tech pubs, the lighter ones that I could skim-and-toss in ten minutes I read every week -- Wired, I still have back issues from the 90s here!

Then I installed Bloglines and joined to the great Blog revolution. Despite occasional severe pruning, I have 96 feeds, some with 200 unread blogs, others with two or three hundred Saved blog writings. I love it; I can't spend four hours a day on it. Of course, I started four blogs of my own, to add to the general noise level. Sigh.

I finally signed up for Twitter, which offered me the opportunity to Follow the tweets of the people in my Gmail contacts list -- it turns out 82 of my friends and colleagues are Twittering. Eighty-two.

I Followed them all, just to get my feet wet. I now spend 20 minutes twice a day scrolling through Tweets, almost all of which aren't especially of interest to me. I UnFollowed two friends today and it was like losing five pounds.

Ovewhelmed by info? Oh yeah. Yet I love the stream of info, some of which is amazing, fascinating, amusing, shocking. Bury me with my stacked-up magazines, and my laptop tuned to Twitter and Bloglines -- I'll smile all the way to damnation, and complain to St Peter about it.

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Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat,Pray,Love) On Creativity & Dobby the House Elf

Gilbert's talk at the (wonderful) TED Conference can be an inspiration to each of us who hopes for creative opportunities to blossom in our retirement:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/453

Ole!

-mac

PS: As one who has already had an achievement that leads to the suspicion that one's greatest achievement is behind one, I was particularly impressed with this speech.

"Elderhostel" Force to Change Its Name....

The education-travel company that has specialized in (pricey) trips with educational themes, mainly aimed at retired people, has hit the Boomers wall, apparently: They feel compelled to change their name, on the grounds that some members and would-be members object to the notion of the word "Elder."

Some also don't like the word "hostel" because the accommodations are actually first-class hotels and the like.

They claim they will also try to find ways to cut the prices of their (to me) breathtakingly expensive packages. (They have "scholarships" but that's not a solution for most of us.)

The new name will be unveiled in the fall.

COMMENT: I think this is another in what will be a wave of problems created by us Age Deniers, the Boomer generation: We hate any reference to aging, so it becomes a problem for any marketers. I've run into this: I have a site for those of my generation who are retiring; BoomersRetired.com -- and I can guarantee you, the word Boomers will be a problem on an ongoing basis. But it's hard to work around: My site is aimed at my generation, not the previous generation now in their 70s, and not at GenX either, who are too far away from retirement to worry about it other than financially.

Dealing with the deliberate self-delusions of your market is one of the great challenges every marketeer faces, I think.

mac

Your Wake/Sleep Plan: Are You a Night-Owl, or a Morning Person?

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Now that you're retiring, you may like just fine the schedule you always kept while working -- maybe you get up at 5:30am, and when it's time to go to work, you're ready -- to go to retirement, though, not to work.

And if that's you, that's terrific. My wife is the Original Morning Person: In her ideal world, she'd be up vacuuming at 6am, mowing the lawn at 7am, and working on her photo albums by 10am.

Oy! That's not me. But it has taken me two years of retirement for this to dawn on me.

RETURNING TO MY NATURAL RHYTHM
When I was freelancing many years ago and working from home -- back in my youth -- I worked best in the afternoons and at night -- I had to unwind around 1am to hit the sack, and didn't really function until 10am.

But that was then. In the many years since, I've gotten up on weekdays anywhere from 5:30am to 7:30am, depending on the job requirements. And I've struggled -- not always successfully -- to get to bed before 11pm so I could function in the mornings.

Yet when I retired, I tried to keep to the same schedule as when I was working -- get up at 6am -- OK, make that 7am -- so I "won't waste the day."

Trouble is, I waste the mornings anyway, as I drag myself out of bed and then sit at the breakfast table, reading both newspapers and nibbling away for two hours or more. Then I'd find ways to dither away most of the rest of the morning, in a fog, only becoming functional as noon approached.

We eat at 6 or so, then we go out for the evening, or, more commonly, watch some TV until 9 or 10, then head to bed. Where I toss and turn for too long.

The "Duh!" moment came recently when I switched my watercolor-painting class from Monday mornings to Thursday evenings. It made a huge difference.

I was a slug at the Monday morning classes. Unhappily, coffee does not wake me up and stimulate me the way it does many people, so I couldn't rely on the chemical boost. So I'd zone off through the morning class, happy when it petered out near noon.

Image by DailyPic via Flickr

The Thursday evening class is a whole different thing. I am awake and alert at 7pm when I arrive, and in the next two hours I actually get more done than I had in the Monday-morning three-hour class.

Well, I'm not stupid! It only took me several months of that for it to sink in. I am still a night owl! I haven't converted to a morning person by dint of getting up at 6am for thirty years! I am not asleep mornings because I'm lazy -- or, well, not only because I'm lazy. It's how I'm built!

So I've switched my schedule: Now I get up at 8am, I don't worry about wasting the mornings (I try to do things that don't require attention or brains), and I get rolling after lunch.

Then after dinner, and after TV, at 9 or 10pm, I head back to my computer or my art desk and get back to work for the next two hours!

I go to bed at midnight, and I sleep like a baby!

TIME TO CHECK YOUR PULSE
You can do the same thing. Retired, your life is now different in many ways. Figure out what your natural sleep/wake rhythm, and adjust yourself accordingly. See how that feels.

It's not all perfect. There's the Partner thing -- my wife is a morning person and I'm a night person, but she is, lucky for me, very accommodating -- she waits to vacuum until 8am, isn't that sweet?

Give it a try.

AND ANOTHER THING: MAKE YOUR NEW TO-DO LIST

Image by Today is a good day via Flickr

If you are the kind of person who lives by your to-do list -- a lot of people in white-collar jobs have to juggle many independent activities at once, and without a to-do list, you'll keel right over! -- then as retirement day looms, you will want to do to your To Do list the same thing that you're doing with your emails: Rework it completely!

You won't go from a 15-page bullet list of things to do, to an empty page! Believe me! You will soon have a 15-page bullet list of NEW things you now want to do -- things that will be fun, or just things that will be very satisfying, now that you have the time to pay attention to them!

And, as with your emails, your to-do list needs to be revisited from time to time, and adjusted as you learn and grow!

Tame Your Email (Now That You're Retired)

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You get a lot of email related to your work and career -- email lists, publications, PR lists, associations. Now that you're retiring, it's time to clean it up.

Otherwise you'll still be getting a hundred emails a day, but they won't be relevant. Or, frankly, all that interesting, the further away from retirement day you get.

Bummer! Well -- on the OTHER hand, you will now have time for a lot of the kinds of emails of much more interest to you in your newly retired persona: Emails from friends, from and about hobbies, linking you to social-network sites you never had time to pay attention to before.

STEP 1: CUT/PRUNE/SLICE MERCILESSLY
If you have mixed feelings about leaving your old job, this step may be a bit painful. It emphasizes the change. If you are ready (more than ready!) to lay down your load, however, this can be a refreshing, stimulating step, and a relief!

For your work email, in the month or two before you retire, start by unsubscribing from mailing lists you know you soon won't need -- this will be mainly emails you get from trade publications and the like. You won't be needing to keep up on this stuff; you will soon have better things to do.

[BUT! If you plan to keep one foot in the water -- freelancing or consulting with your old company or in the industry -- you'll be more selective about what you chop. And the lists you want to stay on, change them to your home email address!]

When you've done this first cutting step, your mailbox may lighten up considerably. It's surprising how much info comes to you through that email window!

You may also have to let clients or agencies and other relationships know you'll be taking off, and handing them over to somebody else, if that's appropriate. (Or hint to them that you'll still be doing some consulting/contract/freelance business in the future, hint hint hint.)

This might also be the time to create a general-purpose retirement announcement, ready for your last few days, when you can send it out to everybody else -- colleagues, partners, more distant clients, providers, and just buddies. Expect to get a lot of feedback from this emailing -- you might want to have a more detailed boilerplate response to the inevitable "Whatcha gonna do now, buddy?" replies.

When you get home, do a similar hack job on the no-longer-needed email lists you're on at your home email address.

STEP 2: SIGN UP EXTRAVAGANTLY
Well, that's a relief! Now let's turn around and sign up for a bunch of stuff -- but this time, it's stuff revolving around your new life! You probably have an idea of several Web sites, magazines, clubs, interest groups, maybe social networks, schools, entertainment venues, and other activities that will now be able to get more of your attention -- so make a master list and start signing up for new stuff. Pretty soon your mailbox (both email and postal) will start filling up with great ideas for things to do.

STEP 3: LATER, PRUNE IT BACK A BIT
If you're at all like me, you will go 'way overboard with Step 2. But that's OK -- you're testing your wings, trying the air currents, seeing what you like and what was actually a pain in the neck now that you have time to take a closer look at it. So put on your calendar, right now, a date six months or a year from now -- that's the date you will REVIEW all your lists, mailing lists, clubs, groups, and activities -- and plan to cut back on the ones you're not interested in. This is what you can expect when you are in Exploration Mode, which is where you'll be for the initial part of your retired life. Check it out -- cut it off if you don't like it. Learn, choose, learn some more.

And then do it again in a couple of years. Keep the email box supple and flexible, not bogged down with dumb stuff you skip right over!

My new night-owl sleep-wake schedule!

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Last night I went to bed at 11 and tossed and turned and finally decided that I need to change my wake-sleep schedule to something that suits me better.

I have always been a night-owl, but since I retired two years ago I have tried to shift my daily schedule to get up in the mornings, for two reasons: First, for a vague sense of not wanting to waste the day; and second, because my wife is a morning person and would love nothing so much as to start vacuuming at 6am; it's frustrating for her not to be able to make any noise until I get up, and if I get up at 9 or 10 she'll go crazy.

So I have tried getting up at, say, 7am or earlier, and going to bed at 10 or 11. It's not working.

I drag in the morning; as a result, I spend at least two hours on breakfast, reading the paper and drinking coffee and trying to get rolling. (I have discovered to my dismay that the caffeine in coffee appears to have no energizing impact on me; I tested this and found I could have a cup of strong coffee just before bed without interfering with my sleep. Sigh.)

I have a watercolor painting class at 9am Mondays and I've dragged through that class for two years. A couple of months ago I switched to the Thursday evening version of that class—and what a difference! I get more done, and am more awake, and in a better mood Thursdays at 7pm than I ever have been Mondays at 9am!

I finally am getting the hint my body is sending me: Change the schedule!

So I will try this schedule:
Up at 8am.
After dinner, watch TV as usual or do other relaxing things until 10pm
10-midnight – go back to my computer or workstation and write or paint or do other work.
I'll still get 8 hours sleep but I might get more done!

We'll see.....