Your complete guide to mastering your early retirement

Your complete guide to mastering your early retirementYour complete guide to mastering your early retirementIm waking up every damn morning with a smile on my face with the following 18-or-so hours ahead of me to do with as I please. The other 6 hours or so Im sleeping. Ive found I dont need a ton of sleep.I have no bosses to impress, no time cards to punch and no stupid deadlines or endless meetings just for the sake of team unity. Inearly retirement, you truly are the master of your domain.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moraBut, it wont always be quite as easy for everyone, and it all starts with a very simple and unifying themeYou need to do something in early retirement thats your purposeI can talk about purpose until Im blue in the face because, well, it really is that important. Not that I relish the thought of losing enough oxygen for my face to get blue, but you get the ide a.Purpose iskinda important.Its important because having the entire day ahead of you with nothing on the schedule comes with ita whole other set of potential problems. When the buck stops with you,shit gets real.Do you want shit to get real? I mean,thatreal? Do you want the responsibility of owning your entire day without the structure that a full-time job often provides?Its similar to being your own boss or working for yourself. It sounds good in theory, but you also need to own it. You need to be a special kind of person to manage yourself.Its not as easy as it sounds.To successfully manage your own time in early retirement,you need to know yourselfwell. You need to know what makes you happy and what doesnt. You need to balance your fun with your work and know how much time to devote to each individual thing.If you think thats easy, then you might be in for a world of hurt.On the flip side, you cant over-schedule yourself after quitting your jobI have fallen terribly close to this point in early retirement. Im so motivated to try new things and get involved that, quite frankly, I have a tough time saying no. Im always looking for mora.And, thats not always a good thing.For instance, I have this huge blog that Im maintaining. My wife and I also run a growing YouTube channel atA Streamin Life. What else?I startedanother blogaboutdigital marketingI do consulting work at Rockstar FinanceI write for bloggers/websites on specific projectsIm involved in several blog projectsAnd, my wife and I travel the country for a livingAll this stuff takes time, and Id be lying if I said that time never gets away from me. Even after retiring early, I sometimes feel that there arent enough hours in the day, andthats my own fault.I just like being involved with things. Things that keep me focused and energized. Ultimately, a strongly believe thats good. It is.But, the trick is toproperly manage your timeso you dont feel like you have a job again. After all, Iretired earlyin large part to recapture my time, and the last thing that I want to do is sign myself up for enough projects that I feel like I dont have enough time to justrelax and enjoy life.Managing your time is crucial.Youll fail without time-managementForget the money component of early retirement for a minute. Of course, we all know that we need money before quitting our jobs. Thats the most obviously and clear-cut aspect of FIRE.What isnt so clear-cut is, well, us. You and me.Life is an organic entity. We arent using a bunch of repeatable mathematical equations to rule our time like we might use to come up withhow much money well need before calling it quits.If you cant manage your time, you wont be happy in early retirement. It really is that simple. You cant quit your work structure if you cant replicate that with abetter structure.Its a structure thatyoudesign and impose uponyourself. This is the hard part.And, I cannot teach you how to do this, but I can give you the basic outline of what a s olid structure looks like.What times of the daydo you feel most productive?Are you anearly morning person or a late riser?Are your hobbieseasy enough to pursueon a daily basis?Do you have aone year, two years and five-year goals?Adirectionis critical, and understanding how you work the best is how to set yourself up on the path to head that way.For example,I know that I do mybest work in the morning hours. Therefore, I focus on the most critical aspects of my life in the morning. Everything else takes second priority. The morning is my time to focus.When I can properly focus, I can get my work done on my side projects. I feel productive and motivated to repeat that process the next day and Im actively strutting in the direction that I need to go.The more that you understand about yourself, the better equipped youll be tocustomize your lifein a way that makes sense.Stop worrying about the damn risksFirst, let me preface this discussion with a very simple statementAnything can happen in early retirement. You might fall down a flight of stairs the day after you call it quits, break your leg and undergo a series of painful and expensive surgeries.Or, you might get into a car accident. Or a train wreck. Or contract a disease. Or*fill in the blank*. The point is that yes, things happen. Markets crash. People over-spend.Theres no doubt that quitting your full-timesource of incomein your 30s, and expecting to live not 20, 30, or even 40 more yearstry, 60 or 70, without a dedicated income for more than half of your life, is a risk.But for most of us, its a calculated risk. But, heres an important question that we need to ask ourselves.What about the risks of staying at our jobs? especially stressful ones. AsABC reports A growing body of research stands testament to this fact lack of sleep has been shown to tax the hearts of the stressed executive and the stressed day worker alike.Layoffs, the report continues, can take their psychic and physiologic toll in the executiv e suite and on the production line the burden on those left behind, who work more overtime to shoulder a heavier workload, can be life-shortening and living in fear of losing a job, or staying put in a hostile workplace, also boosts the risk of an earlier cardiac death.I hate the risk ofnot retiring earlymore than the opposite. To work the vast majority of our life and then retire during the portion of our life where weremore likely to get sickis a dreadful thought. To develop krebs. Suffer from mobility-inhibiting aches and pains. Its painful to even think about.Consider this graph fromCancer.gov.The wide majority who develop cancer are above the age of 50.The highest incidents of cancer occur between 65 and 74 which, coincidently, happens to coincide closely with the age that we can draw social security without penalty 62.Does anyone else see a problem with this?Risks run in both directions, ladies and gentlemen. Were wise not to hone in on the risks OF early retirement and ignore the risks of NOT taking your life (and your time) into your own hands.To me, itsway more risky to retire during the period when were most likely to develop a health problemthan it is much earlier in life.At what point do we begin to consider the risks of NOT retiring early and weigh those against the risks of quitting the hinweis race early?Risk is a two-way street, my friends.Every once in a while, do something insaneIvewritten about this one before Comfort zones crush our ability to improve our lives. They keep us wrapped up in a cocoon of mush, complacent and completely relaxed. Reflection and bettering our lives is often the furthest thing from our minds when were in these zones.Instead of going to the gym to begin that new fitness program, we give ourselves an excuse to stay home. Rather than dropping by the neighborhood pot luck to meet the neighbors and network, we catch the latest episode of insert popular TV sitcom here because I honestly have no idea.It is natural to want comfort. And occasionally, theres nothing wrong with a little time in our comfort zones. But spending too much time in this zone is detrimental to our progress. Get out of it.Remember that time that we gave a speech about financial independence in front of hundreds of people? I do, because that was just a couple of months ago at the RV Entrepreneur Summit.Okay, while I wouldnt consider that insane, it definitely got us out of our comfort zones. We were nervous as hell before going up there, but once we got up on stage, everything fell right into place.Confidence is a convenient virtueI am, like, super duper confident. Confident to a fault.I firmly believe that what we are doing is the absolute right thing, and weve made our decision. We are jumping in head first and not looking back. I quit a high paying and relatively low-stress job in theInformation Technology industryfor a life of freedom.And Im damn proud of what were doing.Confidence is very different than arrogance. I dont be lieve that Im always right. I believe that I make the very best decisions that I can base on the information I have at the time. If Im wrong, then Im wrong. Big deal.We fix it and move on.Life sucks when we spend it second-guessing ourselves. So, I dont. I believe that things will work out. I know that we are flexible and will roll with the punches.Im not worried about health care (gasp). I dont care who ourpresidentis. I refuse to let external factors that I cannot control dictate my life. The only thing that I can control is me. My life. My reactions. My motivations.Confidence is key to keeping a sound mind and determined future. The more confident you are, the better prepared youll be to make early retirement work. Why?Because early retirement, just like life, is a mind game. If youwin the battle inside your head, youll win the battle outside of it as well.What does financial independence and early retirement actually mean to you?For me, financial independence is simple it means that you are not beholden to a job to provide for your livelihood.Instead, your wealth acquired through a high level of income or aggressive savings plan, supports your lifestyle. While you may still work, you dont need to. You work because you enjoy it.To my wife, financial independence is a choice. It refers to the ability to choose the life that we all desire and live it as the person that we all choose to be.Whatever it means to you, make sure that you understand it. This is your guiding principle thatll help ensure youre on the straight and narrow.This article originally appeared on ThinkSaveRetire.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people