Countdown

With only three weeks to go, my impending retirement is getting closer and closer. Although I (we) have been planning this for almost two years now it has suddenly come upon me. I’ve been telling everyone who would listen that I was going and have added the fact as part of my signature. It is in black and white. At first no one believed that I would actually retire and there was a time when I wasn’t convinced, yet circumstances change and now I am certain. At the end of June I will be hanging up whatever it is I need to hang up and am stopping work, paid work that is.

Over the past few months I have been focused on getting stuff off my virtual desk, deciding which needs to be kept going and who to pass it on to, what can stop and what is left to resolve. All of the operational stuff has been passed on while I have jettisoned anything that I was not going to get around too. This leaves just a few things to resolve and I have three weeks to do so.

Obviously my workload is getting smaller and smaller. A few months ago I had more than three hundred tasks on my To Do list and now that stands around eighty, many of which are home based tasks rather than work based. I have noticed that I am becoming less and less relevant at work. Decisions that I would have been asked to make in the past now pass me by. They are for others to make. Conversations that I would have been involved in don’t include me anymore. There is no point. By the time any action is required I will be gone.

I’m not being cut out. No decision was made to bypass me or not include me. Rather, everyone is just  too busy getting on with stuff to include me in their plans. This is inevitable and I have noticed it before in other jobs I have left of my own accord. It is different when I was asked to leave but that is another story. Then you tend not to get too much time to think about it.

Life moves on and an organisation has to be bigger than any individual. I am moving on and others have already picked up the slack. In three weeks I will no longer be there and they will have to get on without me anyway. Only three weeks now!