You Don't Have to Earn Your Rest

Why "Doing Nothing" Is a Perfectly Good Way to Spend Your Time in Retirement

Ask people what retirement should look like and you'll hear about travel, golf, volunteering and grandchildren.

Rarely does anyone say: "I want to spend an afternoon reading a book."

Yet for many people, particularly those leaving demanding careers, that simple pleasure turns out to be one of retirement's greatest luxuries.

The Retired Leader and the Book

Over the years I've met many people who have retired from demanding leadership roles. One conversation has particularly stayed with me. It was with someone who had just retired after decades in a senior business leadership role. Long hours had been the norm for most of their career — early starts, late finishes, constant decisions, always accountable to someone above or below them.

When I asked them about their retirement, whilst they confirmed they were enjoying travelling and playing golf, they also expressed joy in simply being able to relax without feeling guilty that they should be doing something. They told me about sitting down with a book on a weekday afternoon, with nowhere to be and nothing to prove. They said it plainly: that hour felt like it was worth its weight in gold.

No agenda. No productivity angle. Just a good story and a quiet room.

Many successful people spend forty years measuring their worth by their productivity. When work ends, that habit doesn't disappear overnight. The calendar may be empty, but the internal pressure to "make good use of the day" often remains.

It's a small moment, but it points to something a lot of retirement planning misses.

We Plan the Money. We Rarely Plan the Time.

If you think about a typical week in retirement, it breaks down into 21 "boxes" — a Morning, Afternoon and Evening for each of the seven days. Multiply that across a 30-year retirement, and you're looking at over 30,000 boxes to fill.

I would normally advise filling your boxes by focusing on staying active: new hobbies, volunteering, mentoring, learning, connection. All genuinely valuable — purpose and social engagement are strongly linked to healthy ageing, and plenty of retirees find their weeks fuller than they ever were while working.

However, for people who've spent decades in high-pressure, high-responsibility roles, retirement can be a wonderful opportunity to fill some of your boxes with quieter, more relaxing time. Reading a book, listening to the cricket, meditating. It doesn't all have to be climbing mountains, learning Italian or starting another business.

Rest Is Not a Consolation Prize

Here's the thing worth saying plainly: a box filled with rest is not a box you've failed to use properly.

Reading in an armchair, watching a movie, sitting in the garden listening to the birds, or simply doing nothing in particular — these are not lesser ways to spend your time compared with golf, volunteering or a new business venture. They're not the fallback option for days when you couldn't think of anything better to do.

This matters most for people who've spent a working life being useful to other people — leaders, in particular, who measured their days by decisions made and problems solved. For that kind of person, choosing stillness isn't laziness. It's often the first genuinely honest choice they've made about their own time in years.

There's only one trap to avoid. Don't turn retirement into another job.

If your diary becomes full of activities simply because you feel every day has to be productive, you may have carried your working life into retirement without realising it.

Equally, don't put yourself under pressure to have the "perfect" retirement. If reading a book one afternoon turns into another thing you're trying to do well, you've probably missed the point.

The goal isn't to relax well. It's to let some of your boxes be simple, unmeasured, and entirely yours — with no requirement to justify them afterwards.

The Real Question

Retirement planning has traditionally asked one question: will you have enough money? That still matters. But for anyone lucky enough to have thirty or forty years of retirement ahead, there's an equally important question that gets far less attention: how will you spend your time — and will you let yourself enjoy the parts of it that don't look like an achievement?

Money can fund a retirement. It can't tell you that it's alright to spend a Tuesday afternoon doing nothing more than sitting with a book.

That permission has to come from somewhere else.

Perhaps one of the healthiest questions to ask yourself is this:

If nobody ever knew how you spent tomorrow afternoon, what would you choose to do?

Whatever your answer, remember this.

You don't have to earn your rest.

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