What I Would Do If I Wasn’t Working Full Time

“But, what in the world would you do if you didn’t work?!”

If you’re on a journey to financial independence, and plan to retire earlier than the traditional 60-65 work-til-you-drop age range, do you ever hear this response when you share your plans with others?

The early days of my financial independence journey

I came across the concept of financial independence around 2014. And until about 2018, I had no plans to retire early.

I liked working and didn’t plan to stop. I was on the hamster wheel of checking off life’s boxes (or should I say society’s boxes). I was about to earn my PhD, I had my dream postdoctoral fellowship lined up, and soon enough I would even have my dream job as an Assistant Professor in my dream location.

Some day, I told myself, I would get tenure and live a long and happy life as a Professor. Retiring early was never on my mind.

At the time, I had read The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins (which in a nutshell represents how I manage my money), and what resonated with me most was having F-You money. F-You money gives you options. Maybe I could take extra unpaid time off. Or I could take a year off here and there.

I liked the idea of having options, and that was about it. If I hit financial independence one day along the way, great.

And then, life happened

Well, if you’ve read my story, you know that all of that fell apart. As they say, if you want to make God laugh, tell them your plans.

As a new professor, my days had me going NONSTOP from wake to sleep. I would wake up super anxious about the day (nothing new as I’ve struggled with anxiety my whole life), go over the material I was supposed to teach that day while I ate breakfast, go to work and somehow make it imposter syndrome my way through the day, and then come home and have to prepare for the next day while eating the same dinner that I would prep on the weekend and eat all week (typically a casserole of some sort or a soup/stew/chili). I’m exhausted just typing it all…

There was really no time to think about anything else.

I was miserable, and I knew I needed a change.

Slowing down helped me realize that there’s more to life than work

Leaving that job was brutal, for many reasons. But when I found myself on my feet again, with a new, much less demanding job, the biggest change I noticed was that I had so much more time in the day than I used to.

I started working as an editor for a company where if you were efficient, you could get your work done in 35-38 hours per week. And at the end of the day, I could shut down my computer and not think about work. It was amazing.

Never in my life had I worked so little and had so much extra time and space in my brain. I started to feel alive. Family and friends told me how different, how much happier I seemed.

As I explored how I wanted to spend that extra time, I found myself drawn to things that surprised me.

I started going to church again, which I hadn’t done regularly since I was a kid, and I could only count the number of times I went as an adult on one hand. I even found myself thinking about writing a sermon, which I eventually wrote and delivered to the congregation. Side note: after standing up in front of a classroom of up to 150 students every day for 2 years, standing up in front of people at church felt like a walk in the park.

I began to volunteer again, something I had loved to do in graduate school. I love hiking, so I started leading hikes for my local chapter of the Green Mountain Club. I saw an ad in the paper for volunteers to “work” at our local nature visitor center (I sit in a beautiful place for a few hours, get to read my book, and talk to and meet new people who are excited about nature).

I noticed that I started to have what I now call “creativity whispers”, where things or ideas I wanted to write about or tell about would come to me out of the blue, and typically I would need to immediately write them down or they’d be gone forever. One night in bed before I fell asleep, I thought of a memory that I realized would make a good story. When I woke up in the morning, it was still in my brain, so I wrote it all down. That same day, I saw in the paper that my town was going to have a local Moth Radio Hour-like event. It seemed crazy, but I felt it was fate, so I signed up and ended up giving the talk. It ended up being one of the best experiences I have ever had, one of my favorite days of all time.

Designing my days to start living my best life now

It wasn’t until I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic that I realized what was happening. She says:

We need you to stay as light and unburdened as possible in order to keep you creating.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

A lightbulb went off for me. I was realizing that I had all these creative desires outside of work. All these “creativity whispers” that I had never given the space to take shape in my life.

I realized that even though I was early on in my journey to financial independence, with a long way to go, I could still craft my days to more closely align with all these things I’d been learning about myself if I stayed in a job that didn’t take up all my time and mental space.

Based on what I had learned about myself, I worked to design a life where I could be happy day to day. For example, I know I need exercise, so I started implementing a daily walk. When its raining, I do yoga or ride my spin bike. I also take time to journal. I meditate. I write more. I even started this blog!

Designing my days this way has brought me so much more joy while I’m working my 9-5 fulltime and striving for financial independence.

However, if you read my last post, you know I still want to downshift to part-time work once I hit Flamingo FI.

My Financial Freedom List

The reason I want to downshift to part-time work is not just so that I can work less. It’s so that I can have more time to pursue other passions aside from work, to let the “creativity whispers” fly even freer.

How do I know what those “other things” are? Well, because I have gotten really good at listening to the “creativity whispers”!

It starts with designing your days, but at least for me, I’ve found that that has just led to other things I know I want to do that would be a lot more difficult to fit into a 40-hour work week schedule.

How I manage these “bigger” wants is that I keep a Financial Freedom List, or FFL for short.

This is the list I tell everyone about when they ask me the dreaded “what would you do if you weren’t working??” question.

When I was working the low-stress editor job, in addition to experimenting with how I wanted my days to look, I also started keeping lists of activities I may want to pursue one day. These lists were also extremely motivating toward my financial independence goals. 

One of these lists consists of a Gmail folder where I stash anything that comes through my Inbox that interests me – events that strike my fancy, organizations that I may want to volunteer for, local communities in need.

The trick with this is that if it doesn’t make my heart flutter a little bit, it doesn’t get saved there. This way, I know when I check that folder that everything saved there sparked some “creativity whisper” in me at some point in the past.

Even if I never end up doing these things, the Gmail folder provides a place I can revisit to see what things I have stored there in the past. And these things might lead to other ideas.

I’m surprised every time I look in there, not able to believe that I have saved something. And it always gets me thinking again. For anyone who journals, it’s kind of like re-reading old journal entries (did I really say that? Think that?).

I also jot down things in a notebook I keep with me wherever I go, and I keep a list on my phone in my Notes app. This way, if I think of or hear about something when I’m away from my computer or home, I can easily add it to the place where I know it’s supposed to go.

I haven’t gotten to the point where I delete anything because I know that if the thing was special enough to go on there in the first place, it deserves to be there. Even if it doesn’t resonate with me the next time I check the list, it may resonate with me again one day.

Finally, I keep a master list. This is my FFL. This is the place where I write down anything that really sparks me on multiple passes through these lists. Things I think about even when I’m not looking at the lists. Things that I think about in bed at night the way the TED-talk-like story came to me.

Here are some of the things that are currently on my Financial Freedom List:

• Become a meditation instructor
• Work as a counselor at a summer camp (a specific camp with a mission I’m passionate about)
• Become a Certified Financial Planner
• Go on a hike in the Green Mountains once a week
• Write a memoir

Once I started doing this, I was hooked.

I check in with my FFL, add to it, and contemplate it constantly.

These are all things that would be really difficult to accomplish (for me at least) while working 40 hours a week, but are all things I will consider pursuing once I hit financial independence or downshift to part-time work.

My FFL has provided me with my “why” for pursuing financial independence, and has helped me solidify my goal of part-time work and Flamingo FI. It helps me know what I want to “retire” to.

Do you have a FFL? What’s on your list? What would you do if you didn’t work? I’d love to hear from you!