I’ve talked with a surprising number of people who know exactly how many days remain until their retirement.

“415 days.”

“Just two more years.”

“I’ve got a countdown app on my phone.”

I always smile because I remember doing the exact same thing—but not for retirement.

For Christmas!

When I was a young child growing up in Iowa, Christmas seemed impossibly far away. Every day mattered. We’d make paper chains, open the next door on the Advent calendar, or mark another “X” on the calendar. The anticipation was almost as much fun as the day itself. Well, that and the last day of school before Christmas break began!

Then Christmas arrived. It was wonderful. Until it wasn’t.

By late morning, the presents were opened, the excitement had settled, and there was a strange feeling I couldn’t quite name as a child. I had spent weeks looking forward to this one day. Now what?

Retirement can be a little like that if you count down to a specific day.

Many people devote years to preparing financially for retirement. They know exactly when they’ll claim Social Security, how Medicare works, and whether they’ve accumulated enough to stop working.

Those are important questions, but they’re only about arriving. They don’t answer what comes after.

Questions about your purpose, what will challenge you and help you to continue growing, how to share your experience and perspective, and what will spark your creativity?

These are harder questions and that’s one of the reasons I’ve become an advocate for phased retirement. Not because everyone should continue working, but because everyone should begin exploring.

A phased retirement gives you permission to experiment while you still have the structure of your career. You can discover whether consulting energizes you—or drains you. You can mentor, teach, volunteer, serve on a nonprofit board, write, learn, travel, or pursue interests that have quietly waited in the background for decades.

Some of those experiments will surprise you. Some won’t fit at all. And some might be rocket ships that take you to an entirely new place and group of people. And that’s exactly the point.

It’s far better to discover what gives you purpose before your full-time career ends than to expect purpose to magically appear the day after it does. A phased approach transforms retirement from a destination into a gradual transition.

The countdown still comes to an end eventually. But by then, retirement isn’t one enormous Christmas morning followed by an empty afternoon.

It’s another day in a life that has already begun to expand.

The people I know who seem happiest in retirement aren’t the ones who reached a certain age or accumulated a certain number. They’re the ones who spent the years before retirement becoming interested in what came next.

Maybe that’s the countdown that really matters.