The Blursday Schedule
Six weeks into retirement, I woke at 6:30am with nowhere to be. I'd gained 2,500 hours of freedom a year. I couldn't fill a single morning.
It was a Tuesday in late October when I felt the first pang of emptiness and understood what I’d lost.
Six weeks since I’d stepped back from consulting. Long enough for the novelty of no deadlines to fade. Not long enough to have built anything to fill the vacant space.
I woke up at 6:30am. No alarm, my body clock had the routine embedded after decades of early starts. For a moment I lay there feeling the familiar pre-dawn urgency, that slight anxiety of a busy day ahead. Then my new reality arrived. I didn’t have anything to do. And what day was it, anyway?
It took mental arithmetic to work it out. Had a beef roast for Sunday lunch and beef sandwiches for lunch the following day. Ah yes, it was Tuesday. I double-checked my iPhone to be sure.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or any day ending in Y, it was just the start of another Blursday.
I couldn’t get back to sleep. My fidgeting was beginning to stir Ola. She had to get up eventually, but she was working from home, good for another hour of napping.
I crept out of the dark bedroom as quietly as possible, stubbing my toe on the edge of the dresser and trying to hold back the expletive, I creaked my way downstairs to the kitchen, I’m still not quite sure if it was the stairs or me creaking.
I stood at the kitchen window watching it was just starting to get light, the rain moving across the Amman valley. The clouds were sitting just off ground level; Betws mountain had disappeared completely. This was real Welsh rain, the horizontal kind that renders the best waterproofs useless in fifteen minutes. Through the glass I could see my neighbour driving down the lane, off to check his cows. He had somewhere to be. A purpose.
I used to be one of them, I thought. Someone with somewhere to be.
I made myself a coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. And there I stayed. Not doing anything. Not waiting for anything. Just... sitting.
Ola came down just after half seven. ‘What are you doing down here? Couldn’t you sleep?’ she asked, slightly concerned that I might be ill.
‘I’ve got a lot to do,’ I said. ‘So I got up early.’
I knew Ola would be busy, she always is. It didn’t seem like the right moment to admit I’d just about bored myself to the edge of a coma. I picked myself and the now-cold coffee up and went upstairs to my little office. Maybe there would be something interesting in the news.
There wasn’t.
I’d gained roughly 2,500 hours of freedom a year. That figure comes from adding up typical working hours, commute time, and all the work-adjacent activities – the unpaid overtime, the lunch at the desk, the mental space occupied by tomorrow’s meeting. It’s more hours than a full-time job consumes if you strip away everything work demands beyond the contract. I now had more discretionary time than I’d ever had in my adult life.
And here I was, unable to fill a single Tuesday morning.
The social psychologist Marie Jahoda identified this paradox in the 1930s. Studying an Austrian village devastated by factory closure, she found something unexpected: even when basic needs were met, the unemployed fell apart. Not because they lacked money, but because they’d lost what she called the ‘latent functions’ of work – the hidden psychological scaffolding that employment provides without anyone noticing.
There are five of them.
Time structure: the imposed rhythm of somewhere to be. Social contact: people beyond your family who expect you. Collective purpose: a sense of contributing to something larger. Status and identity: a role that answers ‘who are you?’ And regular activity: a reason to be occupied.
Take away the job and you lose all five simultaneously. You still have a pension. You still have a comfortable home. What you don’t have is the invisible architecture that makes your days make sense.
Jahoda called this sudden abundance of unstructured time a ‘tragic gift’. Modern research has confirmed she was right. A 2023 meta-analysis by Paul and colleagues found that retired people are ‘almost as deprived of the latent functions as unemployed people’, regardless of financial security. The structure gap isn’t about money. It’s about meaning.
Here’s what the research tells us, and it explains something I wish I’d known at that kitchen table.
There’s an optimal amount of free time. Marissa Sharif and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania found the relationship between leisure and wellbeing forms an inverted U. Too little free time, under two hours daily, and you’re stressed. But too much, over five hours, and wellbeing declines due to lack of purpose. At seven hours or more, life satisfaction drops significantly.
The researchers were explicit about the implications: ‘Ending up with entire days free to fill at one’s discretion may leave one similarly unhappy.’
That sentence describes retirement precisely. The 2,500 hours I’d gained translated to roughly seven hours of discretionary time every single day. I wasn’t in the sweet spot. I was drowning in the deep end.
Christopher Hsee, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, has spent years studying what he calls ‘idleness aversion’ – a deep psychological dread of having nothing to do. His experiments revealed something counterintuitive: people who are forced to stay busy are significantly happier than those allowed to be idle, even when the busyness is completely pointless.
‘People dread idleness,’ Hsee concluded, ‘yet they need a reason to be busy.’
Work provided that reason automatically. Every email, every meeting, every deadline was a small justification for activity. Retirement removes the scaffolding and expects you to generate your own reasons from scratch.
And then there’s the matter of Blursday.
Psychologists call them ‘temporal landmarks’ – the Mondays that mark new weeks, the deadlines that create urgency, the meetings that punctuate afternoons. Research by Dai, Milkman and Riis shows these landmarks function like chapter headings, giving shape to time and making progress measurable. When a new week begins, we experience what they call the ‘fresh start effect’: a psychological break between past and future selves that motivates goal-directed behaviour.
In retirement, the landmarks largely disappear. Without Mondays distinguishing themselves from Wednesdays, without ‘before the client presentation’ creating stakes, time becomes undifferentiated. Not because you’re ill or depressed – because the structure that once gave shape to ambition has dissolved. Every day becomes Tuesday.
The pandemic gave us all a taste of this. Remember when people started calling it ‘Blursday’? That collective loss of temporal orientation wasn’t unique to lockdown. It’s the permanent condition of retirement, except nobody warns you it’s coming.
I lied to Ola that morning. ‘I’ve got a lot to do.’ Why?
Research on busyness offers an uncomfortable answer. Columbia Business School’s Silvia Bellezza has documented how busyness has become a modern status symbol. Being overworked signals that you’re competent, in demand, needed. Saying ‘I have nothing to do’ signals the opposite – obsolescence.
‘A busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely lifestyle, has become an aspirational status symbol,’ Bellezza found.
The performance of productivity continues even when the only audience is your spouse. Admitting emptiness feels like admitting failure. That no one needs you. That you’ve become, in some fundamental way, surplus to requirements.
Research on masculinity adds another layer.
The ‘sturdy oak’ norm – that old-fashioned hangover from Victorian days that we still can’t shake – holds that men should never show weakness. This makes admitting struggle harder for men specifically. Research shows that endorsing traditional masculine ideals predicts depression and anger in older men, a solid contributor to grumpy old man syndrome. We’re culturally permitted to complain about being too busy, but having nothing to do remains inadmissible.
The Centre for Ageing Better found that 20% of UK retirees found the transition difficult. One in five. Yet 56% did nothing to prepare for the lifestyle change. We planned for finances as best we could. We planned for more travel. We didn’t plan for standing in our own kitchens wondering who the hell we were now and what purpose we served.
What helped, eventually, wasn’t a revelation. It was something smaller.
The research suggests that external commitments beat self-imposed structure. Telling yourself to get up early and write doesn’t carry the same weight as having somewhere to be. Analysis of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing found that volunteering at least two hours weekly is associated with better wellbeing – not because the cause matters (though it probably does) but because someone expects you to show up. The accountability of external commitment mimics what work once provided for free.
I started with one anchor. A weekly coffee with a neighbour also retired who had taken to garden and car maintenance to break the monotony. A lawn that never grew more than half an inch before the next crop, hedges that were more symmetrical than walls, a car so clean it looked like it had never been driven. It wasn’t about the conversation, really. It was about having one fixed point in the week’s blur.
Later I added a second: a commitment to show something I’d written to someone each Friday. Not because the writing mattered yet. Because the deadline did.
University of Southern California research found that retirees with moderate daily routines – not chaotic, not rigidly scheduled – report 31% higher life satisfaction than those at either extreme. The goal isn’t to recreate the busyness of work. It’s to have just enough structure that time has texture again.
I still wake at 6:30 sometimes. The body clock takes years to unlearn what decades of employment encoded. But now I know what day it is. And I have somewhere to be, even if that somewhere is just a kitchen table with a notebook, waiting for the words to arrive, watching the two donkeys in the field opposite, smooching around, occasionally biting each other’s arse when the other isn’t paying attention.
The 2,500 hours are still there. I haven’t filled them all. But I’ve stopped trying to fill them. What I’ve learned is that time needs shape more than it needs content. Enough structure to know it’s Tuesday. Not so much that Tuesday feels like Monday felt like last week.
What I told Ola that morning wasn’t quite a lie. I did have something to do. I just didn’t know yet what it was.
What did you imagine you’d do with all this time? And what are you actually doing with it? The gap between those two answers might tell you something worth knowing.