Quitting your job? Take stuff with you

Prepare yourself for your next endeavor

Image created via Midjourney

You’ve put in two weeks’ notice. Hooray! Now: what do you do for the next two weeks?

First and foremost, focus your energy on the stuff you want to take with you. Put that before any offboarding, any transitioning of knowledge or accounts, any other internal work. You’ve left the company for a reason, two weeks’ notice is merely a courtesy, and you should put yourself first. That means taking stuff that will help you in the future.

And, of course, I’m not advocating theft or anything that explicitly violates your employee agreement. I’ve taken lots of stuff with no intention of harming my former employer. It’s more of a “you never know what you’ll need” type of thing. I’ve had plenty of ideas (some of them are even amazing) and it’s a lot easier to look at work that I did previously than reinvent the wheel, whether it’s a presentation I can rework, some contract language, or some internal written process.