You know it’s time when your reasons keep stacking up and your fixes have run out. Open your calendar for the next twelve months. If the recurring stuff makes your whole body say “absolutely not,” and you’ve already tried to change things from the inside, stop arguing yourself out of it and plan the exit.
The polite advice is to make a pros and cons list. You’ve made three. One lives in your Notes app under the title “thoughts???” and hasn’t been opened since March.
Lists don’t fail because you’re bad at lists. They fail because you’re excellent at rationalizing. You have a mortgage, a title, a team who’d be stuck without you, and a boss who said “big things next year” in a voice that sounded almost sincere. Every one of those is a reason. None of them is an answer.
And the job usually isn’t terrible. That’s the trap. Terrible jobs are easy to leave. The hard ones are fine. Good salary. Nice people. A path to the corner office that you can see from here and no longer want.
You’re also in a crowded room. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 puts global employee engagement at 20% in 2025, and engagement among managers dropped from 27% to 22% in a single year. So feeling checked out is normal. Normal is still not a career plan.
Look at the calendar, not the job description
Take the next twelve months and scan the recurring stuff. The annual offsite. The budget cycle. The training you’ve run so many times you could deliver it in your sleep (and possibly have). Notice your gut reaction, not your polite one.
One COO with more than 20 years at the same company did exactly this in a coffee shop. She saw a training she’d run “year after year after year” on the calendar and felt a full-body no. Her words: “We’re absolutely not doing it.”
Sort your reasons into buckets
A feeling is a start, not a decision. She argued with herself until her reasons fell into three piles. It was “just time for something new.” She wanted to be around for her teenagers. And she’d tried, repeatedly, to make things better where she was.
Her description of that last one: “I was hitting my head against the brick wall for the third time, expecting it to move.”
If all your reasons sit in the first bucket, you might need a new project, not a new life. If you’ve got all three, you have your answer.
Count the fixes you’ve already tried
Quitting is the right call when you’ve tried to change the job and the job didn’t change. You asked for the new role. You raised the problem. You raised it again, with slides. If the wall hasn’t moved after three goes, it’s a wall.
Say it out loud to one person
A decision that lives only in your head gets renegotiated every Sunday night. Say it to your partner, your best friend, your therapist. She told her husband, an engineer, that she had to quit. His response, by her account: “all righty then.” Two decades of employment, settled in three words. (Engineers.)
Don’t overstay your own exit
Give notice like a professional, not a martyr. She stayed six months to hand everything over and later called it “a big mistake” and “an overgiving.” Leave a clean handover. Then leave.
Hear it from someone who’s done it
Barbara Burgess went from COO to founder of Corluma after one Sunday in a coffee shop. “Literally I had the insight on Sunday, came home and told my husband and gave notice on Tuesday,” she says. Her point is that listening to herself mattered more than the speed. Jump to 1:19 for the coffee shop moment, the three buckets and the husband, or listen to the full episode.
Questions women ask before they quit
Is it OK to quit my job without a plan?
Yes, if you know how many months of bills you can cover. Know your runway before you hand in notice. The founder above didn’t have a plan either: “It’s not like I had the plan first. It kind of emerged over time.”
Should I quit my job if I hate it?
Hate is data, not a decision. Work out what you hate: the boss, the work, or the whole industry. A bad boss calls for a job move. Hating the work itself calls for a career move. Both are allowed.
Will I regret quitting my job?
You might, on a bad Tuesday. You’ll regret staying on a lot of Sunday nights. Pick the regret you can build something with.
Next step: listen to the full conversation, including what came next when she gave notice with no plan in place.