I've been thinking about retiring lately. Oh not that I actually can retire now or any time soon. I'm at least 10 years away from that. What I keep thinking about is what will I do to keep busy when I retire? I am afraid that I will let myself just eat, sleep and watch TV and totally fall apart. What ever will I fill my time up with if I am not working? I'm scaring myself away from wanting to retire. Well almost.

What this thinking has made me realize is that I need to make better use of my free time now. There is this tendency to work hard and then just crash and burn (i.e. sleep all the time) when there is down time. There are things I do like to do for fun but I seem to always be too tired to actually do them.

I need to think about setting a reasonable pace for work so that when I have down time (vacation or week ends) I can enjoy them more. If I don't do that I risk losing the habit of enjoying non-work time. I like my job and so it is easy for it to consume all of my time. It works for getting work done, at least in theory. But it may result in burn out as well. There is a law of diminishing returns as well. Sometimes the more you work the less you actually get down. That has to be taken into account as well.

I have some vacation coming up the end of the month. I think I'm going to try hard to a) enjoy myself and b) put work aside. I need to work on this work/life balance thing.