The Book Is Moving – And So Is the Work

🟢 Designing Your Second Act is officially in production!

After months of writing, interviews, research, revising, and sitting with ideas, Designing Your Second Act has cleared the approval stage and is now moving through the hands of a copy-editor at Taylor & Francis.

Proofs come in July. A real book is taking shape!

---

🧭 What a production schedule looks like and what it reminded me

This week I received the official production timeline from the project manager at Routledge/Productivity Press. Copy-edit review in mid-June. Page proofs in July. An index being commissioned. Dates on a calendar that mean this is real!

There’s something quietly grounding about a schedule like that. Work that lived in my head, then in a document, then in submitted files and is now becoming something you’ll be able to hold.

---

🌱 Why I wanted to share this here

I started this newsletter because I believed the conversation about life after work was missing something. Not more information about financial planning or ‘how much is enough’ to retire. Instead, I share real stories, useful tools, a proprietary framework, and the occasional reminder that this transition is worth thinking about before it arrives.

The book grew out of the same conviction.

It’s not a self-help book in the usual sense. It’s an invitation to approach what comes next the way a thoughtful designer would… with curiosity, intention, and a willingness to iterate rather than wait for clarity that may never show up on its own.

Writing it changed how I see the work. I hope reading it does something similar for you.

---

💡 What this moment is teaching me

There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes not from finishing, but from being in the middle of something that matters.

The book isn’t done. But it’s moving. And there’s something worth naming about that… the value of being mid-process, not just mid-wait.

For many of the people I write about and coach, that’s exactly where they are too. Not retired yet. Not fully clear on what’s next. But in motion, which is different from drifting.

Motion with intention is design. Even when the outcome isn’t certain.

---

✍️ A question for you:

What’s something you’ve been building that deserves to be acknowledged, even before it’s finished?