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A Sixty and Me contributor describes reviewing her calendar and one satisfying day to see how coaching work was crowding out art, friends and other priorities. She suggests scoring five to seven activities from the previous week to identify what felt energizing and what took more time than intended. The exercise is personal guidance, not evidence that it will produce the same results for everyone.
A Sixty and Me contributor has described a week-review exercise intended to help people approaching or living in retirement identify activities that feel meaningful and what may be crowding them out. The report draws on the writer’s own experience: after listing friends, art, nature, writing, family and health as priorities, she found that coaching-related tasks dominated her calendar.
The writer says she retired from a university the previous year and chose to include coaching women through retirement in her own retirement plans. She values the client conversations, but says repeated revisions to newsletters and blog posts, website changes and other business tasks consumed more time than she intended. In a journal entry, she wrote, “I’m constantly finding ways to improve and it’s exhausting me.”
A few days after listing her priorities, she recorded a day she enjoyed. It included coffee with her husband and cat, a walk and breakfast with a friend, knitting, art, writing one newsletter, gardening, a bath, television, errands, dinner and a neighborhood walk. She says doing the activities she valued before the day’s coaching task helped keep work in proportion. On other days, she said, work came first and personal activities were squeezed out.
Her suggested exercise is to list five to seven things from the previous week, including both chosen activities and obligations, and score each from minus five to plus five. The writer defines a high score as energizing or joyful and a low one as draining or tense. She recommends looking for patterns among the highest-scoring activities and considering how the order of events shaped the week.
Using Last Week to Set Priorities
The report’s practical point is that a recent, ordinary week can be easier to assess than an imagined future. For people nearing retirement, the exercise may help reveal which activities they want to make room for after work changes or ends. For people already retired, the writer says even small events, such as a phone call or a walk around the block, can be included.
The account also distinguishes between knowing what matters and making time for it. The writer says she already knew she valued art, friends and nature; reviewing her schedule showed that the timing and volume of work tasks were part of the problem. She plans to block time for art lessons, hiking, exercise, a women’s group and friends. These are her own plans and observations, not a tested guarantee that the method will improve retirement satisfaction for others.
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The Writer’s Retirement Schedule
The report is framed as a personal account and an exercise for readers, rather than a research study or formal retirement-planning assessment. Its author says she retired from university work and made coaching part of her next stage of life because she enjoys helping women think through retirement. The difficulty, as she describes it, was not the coaching itself but the surrounding cycle of revising and polishing materials.
She connects the exercise to a question that can feel abstract: what brings a person joy? The report cites researcher and author Brené Brown’s description of joy as “an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation.” The writer uses that wording to explain her own understanding, then suggests recalling specific moments from the previous week rather than trying to answer only in general terms.
““An intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation.””
— Brené Brown, as quoted in the Sixty and Me report
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Limits of a Personal Exercise
The source presents one contributor’s experience and suggested exercise. It does not report research testing whether weekly scoring improves well-being, retirement adjustment or satisfaction, and it does not compare the exercise with other approaches. Readers’ circumstances may also differ: work, caregiving, health, finances and access to social activities can affect how much control someone has over a schedule.
The report does not establish that any single activity or daily sequence will bring joy to everyone. The writer says she is still working on balance and acknowledges that her own calendar can become crowded. The source also mentions a free email series but gives no details here about its contents or where readers can access it.
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The Writer Plans Calendar Changes
The writer says she is finishing the article while on vacation and expects a busy first week back, with several client sessions. She plans to block time for art lessons, hiking, the gym, a women’s group and friends, and may use a checklist to organize the next day when she senses her schedule is becoming unbalanced.
For readers, the next step proposed in the report is to review a recent week, score activities and consider both patterns and timing. The source does not announce a follow-up study or a deadline for the exercise; it closes with the writer’s intention to keep paying attention to how she spends her days.
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Key Questions
What does the report suggest doing to identify joyful activities?
List five to seven activities from last week, including obligations, and score each from minus five to plus five according to how energizing or draining it felt. Then look for patterns among the highest-scoring activities.
Does the exercise require being retired?
No. The contributor says people who are still working can review their whole week, including time outside work, to notice what they may want more of in retirement.
What did the contributor learn from her own schedule?
She says coaching-related work and repeated revisions were taking more time than intended. On a day she enjoyed, she did activities such as seeing a friend, knitting and making art before writing her newsletter.
Is the exercise backed by research in the report?
The source offers a personal account and practical suggestion. It does not cite a study testing whether the scoring exercise improves retirement outcomes.
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