Delegation now there’s an interesting word. Probably fair to say that it is a concept and action (if you’re lucky enough to have somebody to delegate to) more associated with one’s career rather than one’s retirement.
My broad assumption before retirement was that the retirement period would be a time when having chosen carefully my retirement activities (and that’s important of course) I would be looking to take on these activities, certainly not take them on in order to immediately delegate them. Where would be the sense in that?
I mean why take them on at all if you’re going to fairly quickly hand them over to another person? What’s the point? Well I wish that somebody can answer this simple question for me because this is exactly what I seem to be doing. True it didn’t happen immediately I retired but then I didn’t expect it to happen at all, even seven years after I retired.
Probably the most striking example of this delegation business comes with the Colorado cabin. I won’t give you the whole story right now because it is unfolding even as I write this retirement blog. What I will say is that I have (soon to be legally) handed over the whole project to my daughter and son-in-law.
They seem keen and the fact that we will still be funding most of the project helps I suppose. And this handing over may also help with the dreaded inheritance tax which will be upon us when we both exit stage right. So possibly a win win solution to a) losing money to the government and b) reducing the stress that has grown and grown as I attempted to move on with this last big project.
Truth be told I was making only small amounts of progress and it was costing me emotionally, large amounts. Just didn’t make sense. So this form of delegation to the younger and, in terms of doing it all virtually i.e. on-line at the moment, makes a great deal of sense.
But what about the vineyard? This was definitely a project designed to happily fill my retirement days. And yet I’m giving more and more of it away. Mostly to Brian, my man in the dales, who does just about all of those jobs I thought I would be happy to dabble with when retired. But also to ‘our’ agronomist who I now pay to give me advice which I then pass on to Brian to bring to fruition. There are some jobs I’ve kept for myself and I’ll bring you up to speed on those in my next vineyard blog. But there’s no doubt that I am delegating more and more in what was supposed to be a key retirement area.
Another completely delegated project that I’ve mentioned before is the barn and specifically trying to persuade the planners to agree to ‘change of use’. In other words they agree to the studio becoming a residential property. This I’ve totally handed over to my architect chum and his chum the planning consultant. It will of course cost me as delegation often does.
Sometimes, like the cabin, the cost is emotional or psychological. The feeling of having given something away that has been a large and important, part of my life for a long time. In the case of the barn the cost will be entirely financial. Although this would be more than re-couped if the application for ‘change of use’ is agreed.
One project area in which I have tried to delegate but failed has been the restoration of the old mangle to turn it into a printing press for Mrs Summerhouse. I keep trying to pass this on to our engineeringly literate dog-walking chum. But as quickly as I try to hand it over, he equally quickly hands it back. I haven’t given up hope with this project and if it were wood I’d feel more skilled with the repair but it’s metal you see and I’m not good with metal. Go figure.
And then there is the Vineyard Years podcast. This is a project I had successfully delegated to my chum. Initially this was a win-win because he enjoyed doing it, it was his idea and I enjoyed doing no more than recording myself reading out the chapters of my book. But now he is ill and if I want to keep this project going, which I do, then I’m going to have to reverse delegate. In other words take it on myself (which was previously a disaster although this week – I’ve bought a brand new laptop to see if this makes this challenge more achievable – looks a bit more promising) unless I can find somebody else to delegate this task to.
So I have to say that I’m puzzled. I don’t believe there is a single project that I have set up in my retirement that I wouldn’t happily delegate. That is, wash my hands of, but only on the premise that they would carry on. Carry on, yes but with somebody else’s blood, sweat and tears being the driving force, not mine.
And yet these are projects that I set up in order to provide me with a sense of achievement and pleasure in my retirement years. I repeat, where’s the sense in that? How can I write, on more than one occasion in this retirement blog, that projects were the key to a happy and fulfilling retirement and yet (mostly) cheerfully give them away?
What was that film with Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch? This film title applied to marriage but perhaps it also applies to the state of retirement. Perhaps, after you’ve been retired for seven reasonably happy years, which I have, you get an itch to do something entirely different?
This is a little bit of a scary thought and I seem to have come a long way from a simple consideration of the sense, or otherwise, of delegating aspects of one’s retirement that, like the Colorado cabin, are causing me stress. Just goes to show where writing a retirement blog will take you if you just follow your instincts. Well, my instincts anyway.
A slightly ugly thought to finish with. You could interpret the above as suggesting that goal completion is more important than the process of that achievement. Or that the arrival is more important than the journey. This is not what we’ve always been told. It’s the journey they say, not the destination. Hmm.