Fewer Rooms, More Hours

The house is too big, the job could end, the friendships have gone quiet, and the calendar is finally yours. Four decisions, one season. A calm, practical book for deciding them.Nothing has collapsed. You are simply standing in a hallway on an ordinary Tuesday, looking at a door you have not opened since March, and thinking that you are keeping something going that you no longer use.This is a book about four decisions that arrive together in the second half of life and are almost always made badly, or not at all. The house that costs more in hours than anyone counts. The work you can leave and the work you can't - including the unpaid kind that nobody ever hired you for. The friendships that ended without anyone saying so, and the strange, learnable business of getting to know someone new after decades of not having to. And the week that finally belongs to you, and the particular unease of a long, empty Tuesday.It is written for a reader with a pencil in her hand. Each chapter lays out the real options, says plainly what each one costs, and admits when there is no good choice available. It offers no formula, no thirty-day plan, and no promises about how you will feel afterwards.WHAT IS INSIDE- The room audit that tells you what your house is actually costing you - in hours, not money- Staying, moving, or deciding not to decide: how to choose one on purpose, with a date- Thirty years of objects, and how to ask your family what they want without getting a polite lie- Three reasons to stay in a job that are real, and two that aren't- Going part-time, and what it actually costs you at work- Money as a life question: who has been deciding, what it costs to say no, and the questions to take to someone qualified- How adult friendships are actually made - repetition, the awkward second meeting, and being the one who asks- Anchors instead of plans: a week with a shape and room left to think in- Deciding badly, and how to decide againPERFECT FOR- Women in their fifties and sixties who are actually deciding something this year- Anyone facing a house that has outgrown its household- Readers who want plain adult prose rather than encouragement