“I don’t know how I had time to work!”
In a few days I will have been retired for a year. Like most retires, I say that I’ve never been busier. How does that happen? Things that had to be crammed into a workday night, like dealing with mail or cleaning the fridge, can be done at leisure, which seems to mean they take more time; thus these tasks can keep you “busy,” if you’re not careful. Also, I feel obligated to take care of things I might have put off indefinitely–calling about an insurance claim, for example, or sorting photos. And there is some satisfaction in doing what you feel you should have done before but never did, like making a scrapbook.
But the best retirement busyness is activity devoted to where your passion lies. Sometimes that takes awhile to figure out. For me that’s been joining a GeNarrations writing group in Chicago and publishing my novel.