If you were to ask a hundred people this same question, you’d almost certainly get a hundred and five answers.  To each person there is a different answer, and that’s a part of what makes us humans an interesting lot.

Personally, I’d find more work.  Not the same 8-to-6 grind, of course, but something.  I don’t golf.  I enjoy travel, but I never tire of the feeling of relief  I get entering my own home.  I lack the dexterity to build model ships in bottles.  Even if I could do any of these things well, I’d find a way to make a business out of it: GPS-enabled golf-game tracking service, paid travelblogging, or starting an international ship-in-bottle sales web site.

The bottom line is that finding a business model in everyday activities is the challenge that I most enjoy.  For that reason alone, I’ve resigned to the fact that I’ll never have a traditional retirement.  It simply doesn’t appeal to me – I’d go stir-crazy within a month.  That doesn’t mean that there’s no place for relaxation or enjoyment of some of the nicer things in life.  We love spending time at the beach, as is obvious with this blog, we enjoy spending time with the kids on adventures: either in the backyard or far away from home.  I would love to take a long tour of the best craft beer breweries in America.  The truth is that all of that should be do-able NOW, not “someday.”  In the most perverse of punishments, we simply cannot wait until retirement to spend time with our kids as they grow up.

About a year ago, I read Four Hour Work Week, mostly as a lark.  ”Come on, how could I cut my work time by a factor of 10-15x?!”  Still for $10 or $15, the book was a good beach read, and brought to light some real possibilities.  The book is more about shaping your work to be insanely effective efficient, which can then decrease the number of hours spent to attain specific financial and lifestyle goals.  Even in government contracting, for whom the concept of “one hour” is sacred, there are many ways to optimize time spent such that efficiency is maximized.

Don’t misread my source list, though.  There are a multitude of data sources that I’ve referenced in reaching the escape decision.  Sites lifehacker.com, tech industry news from GigaOm, Engadget, and others have been invaluable.  Even community chatter from sites like digg.com and its ilk have been useful.  (The latter family of sites, however, has a much lower signal-to-noise ratio.)  4HWW was at times just a framework for ideas, at others a substantive resource.  I’ll refer to it often by name, but that’s more because Tim’s ideas were of a different category than the “work your ass off until you are 65, then retire by sitting on a porch somewhere complaining about weather and kids on your lawn” variety.

The idea is to identify what you want to do with your life NOW, then determine how to meet the financial and schedule requirements.  If you approach this in reverse, better known as “traditionally,” then you’ll be committing one of two cardinal sins: Either you’re artificially limiting the scope of what you can do with your life based on your income, or you’ll be constantly striving to make more money to do the things you want.  That last bit just puts salt in the wounds – if you spend more time to get ahead to make more money, you’ll have much less time to do what you want.

There are a number of tools that can be used to accomplish this in a sane fashion.  The next post will look at the keystone of such an effort – the Reverse Budget.

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