How I spent my 2 weeks notice period

I haven’t quit a lot of jobs but I’ve served out my 2 week notice period pretty much the same way each time. The first 3 or 4 days are a bit hectic, my bosses are freaking out and my team is worried about the things they don’t know that I haven’t shown them and users are still looking to me solve problems. After that it evens out a bit, I attend meetings but rarely speak except to defer questions to my replacement. I also meet with people for explicit Knowledge Transfer (KT) meetings to bestow on them my wisdom.

The second week is really a safety net for the company and so nobody thinks I’m a dick for not giving a respectable notice period. While I’m at a job I am careful to document the processes and work that my team performs as well as the work I do so whatever I do that my replacement doesn't know about can be found on whatever portal the company uses. In this most recent case, it’s Sharepoint. I like Sharepoint. It has a lot of bells and whistles I don't use but its integration with the MS Office Suite is unnervingly perfect.

I’ve given 3 weeks' notice in the past thinking I was “soooooo important” I felt providing that extra week was the decent thing to do for these poor, lost souls, spoiler-alert; I wasn’t all that important, they were going to be fine and I was bored stiff by the 3rd week.

So, today, it’s Tuesday of the 2nd week. I have been able to watch the entire series of VEEP (I can’t believe I missed it the first time out) and I’m now into the Doctor Who reboot from the 2000s. I attend meetings still, I even got yelled at yesterday because something wasn’t completed yet…getting yelled at during your notice period is actually pretty funny. My boss said, “I don’t want to be blaming the guy who’s leaving but…” and I cut in with, “you should absolutely be blaming the guy who’s leaving, because why not?”.

The long and short of it is, I’ll always give two weeks notice because people “think” it’s the right thing to do and your departure from the company and how you handle is the last impression you leave but, honestly, a week is probably sufficient if you’ve been a good manager and documented everything you do and made that documentation available and didn’t keep your people in the dark for some false sense of job security.

In the meantime, I have 4 more days of TV ahead of me! I will do some pre-reading for the new gig, but they’re not paying me yet so I think it’s going to be more TV than work.