How to prepare for leaving tech while you're still showing up every day

There's a particular quality to the work you do once you've decided to leave. You're still going through the motions — attending the meetings, hitting your targets, responding to messages with a version of engagement that mostly holds together — but underneath it there's a knowledge you carry alone. You've made the decision. Or at least you're far enough along in making it that you can't really unmake it. What you don't yet have is the conditions to act on it.

This gap — between deciding internally and leaving externally — is where most people spend significantly longer than they expected. The informal accounts of people who've been through it suggest somewhere between six months and two years from "I've decided" to "I've left." That's a long time to be performing a role you've already let go of mentally. It's also a significant opportunity, if you use it deliberately, to build the foundation that makes the transition actually work rather than scrambling after the exit.

The performance you're already doing

The first thing to acknowledge is that what you're doing isn't dishonest, even though it sometimes feels like it. You're fulfilling your role — showing up, doing the work, meeting your obligations — while also tending to your own situation and wellbeing. That is not a betrayal. It's what almost every person who has ever planned a thoughtful career transition has done. The alternative — announcing your intention to leave the moment you've formed it — isn't actually better for anyone, including the organisation.

What you want to avoid is the version where the performance deteriorates into something that genuinely shortchanges the people around you. Not because you owe your employer unlimited goodwill, but because the professional relationships in your current role will outlast your tenure in it, and because the quality of your exit — how you leave, what state you leave things in — is something you'll carry as a professional reputation in a way that most people underestimate. Quietly planning a departure is fine. Quietly stopping caring about the work or the people around you tends to have costs you don't fully see until later.

Building your financial position quietly

If you haven't already, the period before leaving is the time to get serious about the financial preparation. Not with dramatic lifestyle changes that are hard to sustain, but with deliberate, incremental shifts that add up over the months you're still earning.

The first move is knowing your actual number. Pull three months of real bank statements and calculate what you genuinely spend — not what you think you spend, but what you actually do. Include the irregular expenses: the flights, the car service, the annual subscriptions that don't appear in a single month. Add 10% for everything you didn't catch. This is your real monthly baseline, and it's almost always higher than people estimate. Once you have it, multiply by however many months you're planning to be without income, add a buffer of two to three months, and include the cost of health coverage replacement if that's relevant to you. That's your target.

The second move is increasing the distance between your income and your spending. Not dramatically — not in ways that make the next year miserable — but meaningfully. Every month you're still in the role is a month of runway-building if you're intentional about it. Some of the most effective preparation comes from deferring large discretionary purchases, eliminating the spending that's been habitual rather than considered, and channelling the difference into a separate account that is mentally labelled as transition funding rather than general savings. The psychological act of naming the account matters more than it should. It makes the money feel purposeful rather than just accumulating.

Building your professional position quietly

The professional preparation is subtler and takes longer, but it's equally important. What you're building here is not a frantic networking sprint in the months before you leave — it's a position that means you leave with relationship capital, visibility, and a narrative that's coherent rather than hurriedly assembled.

Reconnecting with former colleagues is the highest-value activity here. Not in a way that telegraphs your intentions, but in the way you'd want to maintain any professional relationship: a coffee, a check-in message, genuine engagement with what they're doing. The people who will matter most to your next chapter are almost always people you already know. They're the ones who can make introductions that don't require an explanation of who you are, provide references without much advance notice, and speak to your work from actual knowledge rather than inference. These relationships atrophy during periods of insular intensity, and rebuilding them takes longer than starting them from scratch.

The other preparation work is figuring out your narrative. What do you say when someone asks why you left? Not the full truth immediately, and not a performance of enthusiasm for whatever comes next — but an honest, brief account that doesn't require defending or apologising for. "I was in the role for a long time and reached a point where I want to do something significantly different" is honest, complete, and invites the next question rather than closing it. Practising this before you need it means it doesn't come out awkward at the worst possible time.

Protecting your health while you're still there

This is the part of the preparation that is most commonly neglected — partly because it seems obvious, partly because the people who most need to hear it are usually the most convinced they're managing fine.

If you're burnt out, or close to it, the period of knowing-but-not-yet-leaving is one of the highest-risk phases for your health. The end is visible, which provides some psychological relief, but you're still inside the environment that's been depleting you, and the knowledge that it's temporary doesn't reduce the daily toll in the way you'd expect. If anything, the contrast — between the life you're already imagining and the one you're still living — can make the daily friction feel sharper, not more tolerable.

The practical implication is that this isn't the time to let health maintenance slide. Sleep, exercise, the social connections that have nothing to do with work — these aren't luxuries you can defer until after you leave. They're the infrastructure that keeps you functional enough to do the preparation work, make good decisions under the cognitive load of planning a major change, and actually land somewhere useful rather than collapsing into the first available option when you finally do go.

The timeline question

At some point you need a rough target — not a commitment carved in stone, but a working hypothesis about when you're aiming to leave. Without one, the preparation tends to drift. The financial target keeps shifting. The reconnection work happens inconsistently. The exit date feels permanently hypothetical in a way that makes the whole situation harder to live inside.

The most useful way to set the timeline is to work backwards from your financial target rather than forwards from your current level of discomfort. How much do you need? How much are you building toward it each month? What's the realistic date when you'll hit the number? That date — not a declaration, just a working target — gives the rest of the preparation something to orient around.

A few practical notes: most people who set a target date extend it at least once. That's calibration, not failure. What matters is that you revisit it deliberately rather than letting it slip without noticing. And the target date shouldn't be the minimum possible exit — it should include enough buffer that when you leave, you're leaving from a position of relative readiness rather than a decision made in a moment of acute misery.

What to leave alone for now

The preparation period is not the time to start dismantling your professional reputation inside the current role. It's not the time to stop doing good work, or to tell your manager you're thinking about leaving (unless you have a specific reason and a specific read on how they'll handle it), or to broadcast your plans to colleagues whose discretion you're not certain of. These things cost more than they gain, and they tend to happen when the discomfort of carrying the decision alone becomes too much to hold quietly.

It's also not the time to make fixed decisions about what comes next — at least not before you've done the inner work of understanding what you actually want, as opposed to what you want to escape. Those two questions have different answers, and conflating them is one of the most consistent ways people end up back in a version of the situation they left. The preparation work is creating the conditions for a good decision. The decision itself benefits from more space and clarity than the pressure of "I need to get out" tends to allow.

If you're still working through the financial side of the preparation, the freedom number article covers how to calculate the specific figure that makes the transition work rather than just the general principle of saving more. And if you're trying to get a clearer read on what you actually want on the other side, the finding purpose article addresses the version of that question that's harder than the career planning one.