Balancing work and life with some mini-retirements

Summertime and the livin' is easy . . .

Well, maybe it was, back when George and Ira Gershwin wrote the song. But these days, even when summer comes, nothing seems easy. Once it's here, we start sorting out schedules with co-workers and family members to arrange vacation times, and we're nervous about untethering ourselves from e-mails, text messages, Facebook and Twitter.

Suddenly, summer's over and I, for one, am left wondering, how did it blow by so fast -- again?

A few days ago, I began looking forward to retirement (the endless summer). But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn't interested in stopping work and moving to Tahiti as much as blending pieces of retirement into my current life.

Human resources managers talk about ways to help employees achieve a "work-life balance"; I'm looking for a "career-retirement balance."

In his book, "The 4-Hour Workweek," Timothy Ferriss, offers an interesting alternative to what he calls the "binge travel" style of vacationing -- "mini-retirements."

Ferriss defines the mini-retirement as a series of recurring events -- a lifestyle. "I take three or four mini-retirements per year," he says. "Sometimes these sojourns take me around the world; oftentimes they take me around the corner . . . but to a different world psychologically, where meetings, e-mail and phone calls don't exist for a set period of time."

For me, changing to a life of mini-retirements would require a major adjustment for my family -- not likely to happen soon, especially in today's economy.

Still, it's a concept worth pursuing so I recently sat with Ellen Cooperperson, president of Corporate Performance Consultants in Hauppauge, to consider how people might create "mini-retirements," even if only in modest steps.

Cooperperson, who has consulted extensively on work-life balance issues, pointed out that I'm like a lot of hard-charging baby boomers who don't want to wait 10 years before enjoying the long-anticipated passions of retirement. And the workers behind them, the Gen Xers and Gen Ys, are even more time-focused. They want "discretionary time" built into their jobs from the get-go, and they're not necessarily committed to the corporate workplaces that consumed their parents.

Meanwhile, we all need to face the realities of the day: It's rough out there. Millions of workers are still jobless; employers are struggling to recover from the recession, even as they strive to meet growing competition from the global marketplace.

"The stress levels are so high these days," Cooperperson says. "Companies have dumped more work on employees. The workdays have gotten longer. Everything's got to be done now."

But at some point, the economy is going to turn around and workers will have more options, Cooperperson says. They're going to leave behind the "urgency addiction" of today's corporate culture in search of the kind of discretionary time that I've been seeking.

So what do we do? We need to have a serious dialogue about how to we can run our businesses and serve our clients well, while also allowing workers to recharge their batteries and rebalance their lives. This is what's called "the courageous conversation," Cooperperson says, "when the stakes are high, emotions are strong and opinions vary."

In her own firm, the conversation has resulted in some shifts for Cooperperson. She now schedules "white space" in her calendar - no appointments or tasks, just time to relax or think or take a walk.

(I mentioned that I sometimes take "walking meetings" as a way to feel more connected to my surroundings while stimulating ideas that seem to flow from the walking. "I like that," she says. "I'm going to add that to my list.")

Cooperperson also decided to take off Fridays during the summer to help balance her long hours during the rest of the week. At first, she recalled, the natural tendency was to worry whether employees will be working when you're not watching.

"But we need to build trust and get rid of rigid thinking," she says. "You need to communicate to people, 'This is what I'm doing, and why.' " The result for her company: "The work still gets done -- and productivity is up."

She now realizes she doesn't always have to be there for the staff to perform well, and that, sometimes, workers perform even better when they have a clear idea of what's expected of them and bosses aren't hovering.

Cooperperson and I agreed that these amounted to small, incremental changes. But small changes often lead to big ones, and maybe, just maybe, the road to my elusive pre-retirement retirement.