I have a cart full of art supplies to the right of my desk. To my left, there’s a stool with more supplies precariously balanced on top of it. And, front and center on my beautiful mango wood desk: my monitor, keyboard, mouse, and laptop.
That image pretty much sums up my retirement so far.
When I have open time – no coaching sessions, no workshops, no deadlines – I go upstairs to my study and work on my coaching practice. I tell myself it’s necessary. And sometimes it is. But I also know the art projects I’ve been dreaming about, the creative writing I keep meaning to start, the books stacked on my nightstand – those things don’t have the same gravitational pull as a task list. Working on my coaching practice feels productive. Opening a sketchbook feels indulgent. And for women who spent decades earning their worth through output, that distinction is hard to shake.
Last week I finally moved the laptop off the desk to make room for an art project. I had to physically relocate the keyboard, the mouse – all of it. And when I did, it felt – I’m not exaggerating – like I was finally liberating and respecting myself.
Which told me something I needed to hear: the thing I kept calling productivity was actually avoidance.
I was wrapping up a workshop on the emotional side of retirement – 144 women on Zoom, half of them more than two years into this chapter – when I heard it named out loud for the first time.
I’d asked everyone to drop one word into the chat to describe how retirement actually feels. Some women wrote freeing, wonderful, liberating. Others wrote scary, disorienting, now what, free fall. My favorite: “Scary and lovely at the same time.”
Then one woman added, almost as an aside, that she’d been staying very busy – teaching classes, taking classes, filling the calendar – and then wrote: “I think I stay busy to avoid the problem.”
Four other women immediately responded with some version of: same.
That’s the busyness trap. And it’s more common – and more understandable – than most retirement advice acknowledges.
Busyness Feels Like Proof You’re Doing It Right
After a career built on productivity, calendars, and measurable outcomes, a full schedule can feel like evidence that retirement is going well. If you’re busy, you must be enjoying yourself. If you’re busy, you can’t possibly be struggling.
But there’s a problem with that logic, and I see it in coaching sessions regularly: a woman can stay genuinely, relentlessly busy – volunteer commitments, fitness classes, grandchildren, travel – and still feel a low-grade emptiness she can’t quite name.
Busyness and fulfillment are not the same thing. Staying occupied is not the same as living well.
The distinction matters because if you don’t know you’ve fallen into the trap, you can’t find your way out of it.
What Busyness Is Actually Avoiding
The woman in my workshop was more self-aware than most. She knew she was using busyness to sidestep something. But most of us don’t name it that directly – at least not at first.
What is busyness avoiding? In my experience, it’s usually one of a few things.
Having Free Time
Sometimes it’s the discomfort of open, unstructured time. Many professional women have spent decades operating under the implicit rule that rest requires justification – that you earn your downtime. A blank calendar, then, doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like a warning. Like if you stop producing, you might stop mattering.
Fear of Losing Identity
Sometimes it’s the question that surfaces the moment the noise stops: Who am I now, without the role and the work and the status that came with it? That question is real and it deserves a real answer. But it’s also uncomfortable enough that staying busy can feel like a reasonable alternative – at least for a while.
Just Having the Need to Feel Productive
And sometimes – as I can personally attest – it’s simply that one thing feels justified and the other doesn’t. Working on my coaching practice feels productive. Opening a sketchbook feels indulgent. So I reach for the laptop.
The Research Backs This Up
Psychologist Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework identifies five ingredients that research consistently links to wellbeing: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment.
Here’s what makes retirement uniquely hard: in a single transition, you can lose all five at once.
Your structure disappears – there goes Engagement.
Your role disappears – there goes Meaning.
Your colleagues disappear – there go Relationships.
Your achievements stop being measured – there goes Accomplishment.
And when all of that happens simultaneously, Positive Emotion tends to go underground too.
Busyness can substitute for some of these – it can create a sense of Accomplishment and fill your calendar with other people. But there’s a difference between being around people and actually feeling connected to them. You can have a full social week and still come home feeling a little off, because they weren’t quite your people. And no amount of busyness creates Engagement (the kind where time disappears because you’re absorbed in something) or Meaning (the felt sense that your life stands for something beyond the to-do list).
The Difference Between Filling Time and Designing It
There’s nothing wrong with being busy. Experimentation – trying out volunteer roles, joining groups, testing new routines – is genuinely useful, especially in the first year or two. Some experiments work. Many don’t. That’s how you find what fits.
The problem is when busyness becomes something you do to avoid the blank spaces rather than because it’s actually filling your cup.
A question I often ask clients: If you cleared your schedule for the next two weeks, what would you actually want to do? Not what you think you should do. Not what would look like a good answer. What would you want to do?
For many women, that question is harder to answer than it sounds. After decades of equating busyness with doing life right, the more essential question – what do I actually want? – can feel almost foreign.
Designing your time in retirement means making deliberate choices about what gets on your calendar – and, just as importantly, what doesn’t. It means including a few things you already know will fill you up, not just fill the hours. And it means leaving enough space to actually notice what you’re feeling, what you’re craving, what you might be avoiding.
What It Looks Like to Choose Differently
I’ve been trying to practice what I preach. Not perfectly – the laptop is still winning more days than I’d like – but I’m making small moves.
Recently, I joined a Facebook group for women over 60 who are trying to connect. One woman posted asking if anyone was from Colorado. I mentioned my town. Three other women immediately replied – they live in the same town.
So, I did something that felt, honestly, a little scary: I asked if they’d like to meet for coffee.
One of them already wrote back. “I’m in! I still work, so it’s weekends for me.”
Here’s the thing about that moment: it felt risky. Meeting strangers is a bit like a blind date – it could be a bust, or it could be the beginning of something. Most of my close friends have either moved away or are still working full-time, and I feel that gap more than I expected to. The art, the writing, the friendships – those are what actually fill my life. Yours will look different. But the only way to get there is to show up for the things you want, even when it feels uncertain.
That’s the shift. From filling time to choosing what you actually want, even when it feels uncertain. The art supplies instead of the laptop. The coffee date instead of another hour in the study. The thing that requires you to begin – without any guarantee that it goes well.
A Place to Start
If any of this resonates, I want to offer a simple reframe.
The goal isn’t to do less. The goal is to choose more intentionally.
That starts with slowing down long enough to ask a few honest questions – not in a grand, dramatic way, just as a practice. What did I do this week that actually energized me? What felt like obligation? What am I putting on my calendar out of habit, and what am I choosing on purpose?
You don’t have to have the answers yet. But the willingness to ask is where it starts.
Want Help Getting Clearer on What You Actually Want?
If you’re in the middle of figuring out what a fulfilling retirement looks like – what to keep, what to let go of, and how to build days that actually feel like yours – I created a free resource that might help.
The Retirement Vision Starter Kit walks you through five steps to start imagining the lifestyle side of retirement with more clarity and intention. It’s free, it’s practical, and it’s a good place to start if you’re realizing that staying busy isn’t quite enough.
Download the free Retirement Vision Starter Kit here.
Let’s Have a Conversation:
What’s one thing you keep meaning to do in retirement that keeps getting pushed aside? I’d love to read your comments.
