The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I'm planning to leave my job at the start of the year for a new opportunity. I had been planning to make this move for a while, and over the past few months, I had been neatly winding up my projects. I hardly interact with my boss anyway, and I was glad to tie it all up.
Unfortunately, rather recently my boss drove by and dropped two new projects on my lap. I found myself in an awkward position, where I wasn't ready to announce my impending departure, and would also feel dishonest turning down work when I had availability.
But it has been very hard to get invested in it. One of these projects is realtively minor, but has a late January delivery, and nobody to back me up. It will require me to now put in a lot of holiday hours to get it to a passable state. The other one is a major intiative that would realistically require most of my time next year. I've basically (unintentionally) slow-walked it over the past two months, and I guess I will just drop it altogether in the new year, and leave the stakeholders with essentially 2 months wasted delays.
It's something I feel really bad about mishandling, not for the "company's" sake, but for the humans left hanging, the weird, but necessary duplicity when discussion things January and beyond, and the general failure in doing an good job I can be proud of.
Every other role I've ever left, I put in my notice pretty much immediately after being sure of my next role, and left within 3 weeks. This has been a new experience for me, and I feel weird and like I mishandled it. On the one hand, I wish I had told them 2 months ago, I'd be out at the end of December and to plan accordingly. On the other hand, it would have been a real financial hit to my family if I had been let go immediately in response.
Perhaps this is my Hock.
You handled it more or less as I would have; you have to protect yourself and your family. You pretty much must be vigilant for the possibility where, you give a courtesy two weeks, and your employer marches you out immediately with paycheck implications to boot.
Your fiduciary duty to yourself and your family well-outweighs your fiduciary duty to your firm and your coworkers. Plus, you’ve already done good work for the firm, which can be depreciated/amortized over the course of your total employment.
Your coworkers should be able to deal with it just fine. If not, it’s management’s issue with regard to training and socialization of knowledge. Much of the compensation in knowledge jobs is for being able to absorb what your predecessors have done in the past, even if they were already in quiet-coasting or quiet-quitting mode.
Think of it as granting your current-colleagues a commitment device to take a step-up in their skill-set and responsibility, expanding their scope of ownership. By giving an effort as to make the new projects viable, you have already fulfilled any obligation to the firm.
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