What to Do in Your Last Two Weeks at Work (8 Regrets)
Here's the short answer: the regrets people have about leaving a job are rarely about the work. They are about the people they meant to thank, the favors they meant to lock in, the small things they meant to write down. The final two weeks are long enough to fix every one of them, if you know what to look for.
You can hear the regret in the way people talk about old jobs years later. "I should have gotten her email." "I never told him what he meant to me." "I wish I had asked for that recommendation while I was still there."
These are not dramatic regrets. They are quiet ones. They show up in the first month at the new job, when the dust settles, and you realize the people from the last chapter are getting further away by the week.
What follows is the list of things people most often wish they had done in their final two weeks. Each one has a clear action you can take this week. None of them takes long.
1. They did not collect personal contact information early enough.
Most people wait until the last day to ask for personal email addresses or phone numbers. By then half of the people they wanted are out of office, in back-to-back meetings, or already gone for the day. The window closes faster than you think.
Start on day one of your notice. Send a short DM to anyone you want to keep, with one sentence about why and a request for their personal email. Save the answers in one place — a note, a spreadsheet, your phone contacts. Do this before the calendar fills with handover meetings, not after.
2. They never asked for LinkedIn recommendations.
The single highest-value thing you can do in your final two weeks is ask five to eight people for a LinkedIn recommendation while the work is still fresh in their memory. After you leave, the ask gets harder. The other person has to dig back into projects from months or years ago. Ask now, and your work is right in front of them.
If you have not started, today is fine. The full playbook for who to ask and what to send is here: LinkedIn recommendations before you leave.
3. They did not save their own work.
The decks, the docs, the launch posts, the case studies, the analytics screenshots, the emails that proved something worked. These will not be accessible after your last day. You can lose all of it to a single revoked login.
Pull two or three quiet hours this week and grab everything that proves what you did. Strip out anything proprietary or confidential. Save it to a personal drive. The future version of you — the one writing a portfolio, prepping for an interview, building the case for a promotion — will thank you.
4. They did not have the real one-on-ones.
You meant to grab a coffee with the senior person across the hall. You meant to have the long lunch with your closest teammate. You meant to thank the quiet engineer who unblocked you twice last year. You ran out of time.
The calendar in your final two weeks will fill with handover meetings and project closeouts unless you defend the slots that matter. Block 30-minute one-on-ones in week one. Treat them like work, not extras. The handover meetings compress to fit. The real conversations do not. If you are unsure who belongs on this list, a quick calendar audit at itwasgreatworkingwithyou.com will surface them in under three minutes.
5. They did not write down the things only they knew.
Every job has knowledge that lives in exactly one head. The vendor who needs to be CC'd on a renewal or the integration quietly fails. The dashboard query that only works if you filter by region. The internal politics around that one stakeholder. The fact that the build server reboots itself on the last Sunday of every month.
People skip this because it feels invisible. No one is asking for it. They will ask for it the week after you leave, when there is no one to answer. Spend two afternoons on a clean handover document. The structure is here if you need it: knowledge transfer template for leaving a job.
6. They did not tell the junior people what they noticed.
This is the regret that hits hardest at two years out. You worked with someone good. You watched them get better. You meant to tell them, in detail, what you noticed and what you saw coming for them. You sent the generic group goodbye email instead.
Pick two or three of the more junior people you have worked with. Write each of them a personal note — three to five sentences, specific to what you watched them do. Names, projects, the moment. This is the kind of message people print out and keep. You are giving away something that costs nothing and means everything.
7. They did not ask their manager the questions they had been wondering about.
You are about to lose access to a person who watched you closely for a long time. Before you leave, ask the things you could not ask while you were trying to be promoted. What were my real strengths? What was the thing I never quite figured out? Where did you see me underplaying my hand? What kind of role would actually suit me?
A manager in the exit conversation will tell you what they were holding back. That is worth six months of self-coaching. You only get the answer if you ask.
8. They did not say goodbye to the right people.
Almost every regret on this list traces back to one thing. You were not sure who the right people were, so you tried to reach everyone, ran out of time, and accidentally missed the ones who mattered most.
The fix is upstream. Before you write a single farewell note or block a single coffee, build the list. Not a vague intention — a real list of names. The eight people to thank before you leave a job guide is one way to frame the list. The cleaner way is to let your calendar tell you.
The shortcut that turns this into a single afternoon
The hardest part of every regret above is the same. Figuring out WHO. Most calendars have the answer hiding in them already. Every recurring 1:1, every collaborative meeting, every coffee chat you booked on purpose — those are your real coworkers. The people who showed up over and over are the names that belong on your list.
It Was Great Working With You does exactly this. Upload your calendar export, and in under three minutes you get a ranked list of the people who actually mattered to your last few years of work. It surfaces the quiet contributors a memory-based list will skip every time. Use the list to drive every action on this page — the contact-info ask, the personal notes, the real one-on-ones.
The things people regret less than they think
Not all regrets are equal. A few that loom large in the planning week turn out not to matter once you have actually left.
The dramatic farewell speech. The LinkedIn post visible to the whole network. The clever group goodbye email. These get rehearsed and over-edited, and almost no one remembers them in six months. What people remember is the personal note, the long lunch, the contact info exchange that survived the next job.
Spend your energy on the things that compound. Compress the rest.
What to do this week
If you have ten free minutes today, do these in order. Open your calendar. Scroll back twelve months. Write down the names that appear most often. That is the rough draft of your goodbye list. Then sort by who you actually want to keep in touch with, and start the contact-info ask tomorrow morning. Everything else builds from there.
The point is to leave nothing on the table that you would regret three months from now. A two-week window is short — but it is more than enough if you know what to aim at. Build the list and let it do the heavy lifting.
Further reading: The people you will forget to say goodbye to when you leave your job.
