The months between deciding to leave and actually going

The decision comes first and the exit takes months

People rarely resign on the day they decide. There is a period, often several months, in which you have privately concluded that you are going but have nothing lined up, and that period is peculiar. You are still doing the job, still attending planning meetings about next year, and increasingly aware that your answers in those meetings are not entirely sincere.

That discomfort produces two characteristic failures. Some people disengage immediately, coasting through months of work in a way that colleagues notice and remember. Others overcorrect, taking on new commitments to conceal their intentions, and then leave in the middle of them. Both cost more than the honest middle option, which is to keep doing the job properly while quietly declining to start anything with a long tail.

Searching while employed has a rhythm

The main advantage of looking while still in a job is that you can be selective, and the main practical difficulty is time. Interviews happen during working hours, processes take weeks, and each one consumes attention that your current employer is paying for. There is no arrangement that makes this entirely comfortable.

A few habits reduce the friction. Batch interviews where you can, rather than scattering half-days across a quarter. Take calls off site and off company equipment, without exception. Do not use a work address, a work laptop or a work phone for any part of it, since in many organisations that traffic is monitored and the discovery is both avoidable and embarrassing.

It is also worth deciding early roughly what would make you stay, because a search conducted with no criteria tends to end with accepting whatever arrives first. Someone who leaves a tolerable job for a slightly better paid version of the same problem has usually skipped this step.

Whether to tell your manager

Some people tell a trusted manager that they are looking, and occasionally this works well — it can produce a counter-conversation about scope or pay, or a supportive reference. It also transfers control. Once your manager knows, they must plan around it, and in some organisations you are effectively treated as departed from that day: excluded from projects, passed over in the next cycle, or in the worst cases managed towards an earlier exit than you intended.

The judgement depends almost entirely on the individual and the place, which is why blanket advice is unhelpful. A useful proxy is how the organisation has treated other people who announced they were leaving. If departing colleagues were handled generously, the risk is lower. If they were quietly frozen out, you have your answer.

Protect the things you will need later

Several assets exist only while you are still employed and are awkward or impossible to retrieve afterwards. Your own record of what you achieved, with dates and specifics, which should be kept somewhere personal and should never include anything confidential or proprietary. Personal contact details for the colleagues you would actually want to stay in touch with. Clarity about any scheme with a vesting date, notice terms, or entitlement to accrued leave.

Be careful about the line here. Keeping a note of what you did is entirely legitimate; taking documents, client lists, code or internal material is not, and may breach both your contract and the law in your jurisdiction. If you are unsure what you may retain, the contract is the first place to look and a qualified adviser is the second.

Timing the resignation itself

Once an offer is signed, the remaining decisions are about sequence. Tell your manager first, in person or on a call rather than by message, and before anyone else in the organisation hears it secondhand. Have the written resignation ready but do not lead with it. Be prepared for the counteroffer conversation to happen immediately, since it frequently does.

And resist the urge to compress the remaining time into a performance of goodwill. Long handover documents written in a final fortnight are rarely read. What is remembered is whether the transition was orderly, whether you were honest about the state of things you were leaving behind, and whether you were the same person in your last month that you were in your first year. That is the whole reputation, and it travels further than most people expect.