What to Take Home Before You Leave a Job: Checklist

Before you leave a job, take home your personal belongings, copies of your own work samples you have permission to keep, your professional contacts, and personal documents like pay stubs and performance reviews. Start a week before your last day, not on it. Do not take company files, client data, or anything covered by your NDA.

Most people wait until the last day to clear out. By then the day is already loud — handovers, goodbyes, the small admin of returning a badge. The personal stuff gets rushed or forgotten.

The fix is simple. Move the take-home work up by a week. Bring an empty tote on Monday. By Friday your desk should look almost normal, and the personal sweep should be small enough to do in twenty minutes.

Here is what to pack, what to download, and what to leave alone.

Personal belongings to take home

Anything you brought in from home is yours. The list is shorter than it feels:

• Photos, prints, postcards
• Coffee mug, water bottle, snacks in the drawer
• Plants
• Personal books and notebooks
• Headphones, keyboard, mouse, chargers you own
• Personal chair cushion, blanket, spare jacket
• Diplomas, certificates, framed awards
• Personal stationery and pens that matter

One rule. If you'd hate to lose it, take it home first. Mugs and notebooks tend to disappear in the post-departure cleanup; nobody means harm, they just get cleared.

If you hot-desk or work remote-first, the list is even shorter. Most of it already lives at home.

Personal data on the work laptop

Before you hand back any company device, do a slow sweep. Open every personal folder and every cloud-sync app. Look in Downloads. Look in the Pictures folder. Look in the trash.

What to move off the device:

• Personal photos that synced from your phone
• Text drafts you started on the laptop
• Personal tax documents you opened from email
• Bookmarks for personal accounts
• Saved passwords in the browser — export to a personal password manager, then delete from the work browser
• Two-factor app installs for personal accounts

Sign out of every personal account. Email, social, banking, password manager. Then sign out of the browser profile itself if you used one. If you logged into a personal iCloud or Google account on the device, remove it. IT will wipe the laptop after you leave, but you should not rely on that as your personal-data plan.

Documents to download from your HR portal

The portal usually disappears the day you leave. Pull these now while you still have access:

• Pay stubs — at least the last twelve months, useful for any mortgage or rental application later
• W-2 or local equivalent year-end tax form, if available
• Employment contract and any amendments
• Benefits enrollment summary and current coverage details
• 401(k) or pension statement
• Stock plan documents, vesting schedule, grant agreements
• Performance reviews and any written feedback
• Promotion letters, bonus letters, comp letters
• Training certificates you earned
• Expense reimbursement records still pending

Save copies as PDFs to a personal cloud folder. A bank or future employer will ask for at least one of these later, often years from now. Pulling it from a closed portal is a thirty-minute phone tree at best.

Work samples and the legal line

Be careful here. Most employment agreements treat anything you produced for the company as company property — code, decks, designs, copy, models, customer lists, internal documents. You do not get to take that.

What you usually can keep:

• Sanitized versions of your own work that demonstrate skills without exposing company data — a template structure, a redacted slide layout, a chart format
• Public-facing work that already lives on the open internet — a blog post you wrote, a talk you gave, a published case study
• Personal templates you brought in from a previous role
• Recognition emails and written kudos addressed to you

What you cannot keep:

• Client lists, customer contacts, prospect databases
• Source code repositories or design files in their original form
• Internal financial data, strategy documents, board materials
• Anything labeled confidential, restricted, or covered by your NDA

If you are not sure, ask. A manager you trust can usually tell you in two minutes whether a portfolio piece needs scrubbing first. The cost of asking is small. The cost of being accused of taking IP after you leave is enormous.

Your personal contacts list

This is the one most people miss. Once your work email shuts off, the colleagues you did not already connect with on a personal channel are essentially gone. You will think about them in three months and have no way to reach them.

Two weeks out, start a personal spreadsheet with three columns: name, role, personal contact — phone, personal email, or LinkedIn URL. Add a row every time you talk to someone who matters. By your last day you should have twenty to forty names on it.

Do not promise to keep in touch with everyone. Pick the few you actually want to follow, and write to them within the first two weeks after leaving. The first message after leaving is what sets the cadence — not the LinkedIn connection request.

The other list you should be building at the same time

Packing up your desk is the visible task. The harder one runs in parallel. Who, exactly, do you want to thank before you walk out?

Most people remember the obvious five: their manager, their closest teammate, their mentor, the one client who was kind to them, the work friend they had lunch with. They forget the cross-functional partner who covered for them once. The quiet engineer who fixed a thing on a Friday night. The recruiter who hired them three years ago and never got a real thank-you.

The pattern is in your calendar. The people you spent the most one-on-one time with over the last two years are usually the ones who deserve a personal goodbye. Your memory is bad at this — your calendar is not.

It Was Great Working With You takes a calendar export and surfaces those names in under three minutes. Use it the same week you start packing physical things. The two lists deserve the same care.

When to start (timing matters more than the list)

Two weeks before your last day is normal. One week is fine. The day of is too late.

Some companies will walk you out the moment they hear you are leaving — especially in finance, legal, or anywhere with client-facing IP. If you suspect that risk, do the personal-data sweep BEFORE you give notice. You can always re-collect physical items later; you cannot easily re-pull data from a laptop that has been remotely wiped.

If you have been laid off and given a same-day exit, you may not have access at all. Some companies will let you collect personal items by appointment; others will ship them to you in a box. Ask HR what their process is, then think hard about whether any personal data on the device is recoverable.

For the standard two-week-notice scenario, this pace works:

• Day of notice: back up personal data from the laptop and pull HR documents from the portal
• Week one: bring an empty tote each day and take a few things home
• Week two: finish the physical sweep, sanitize any work samples you will use in a portfolio, and build the personal contact list
• Last day: fifteen-minute pass — final empty drawer, sign out of the last accounts, hand the device back clean

For a wider view of the admin and relational tasks that run alongside this, the last day at work checklist covers the time-of-day arc; this post covers the take-home subset.

The bag strategy

Use a foldable tote, not a moving box. A box on Monday telegraphs your resignation to the whole office in seconds. A tote disappears into your normal routine.

Pack the most personal items first: photos, the small gift from your kid, a framed thank-you note. Anything you would grieve if it went missing. The mug and the headphones can wait until the last day.

If you work remote, the same logic applies to your home setup. The company-owned monitor goes back in the original box on the last day; your personal accessories do not. Sort them this week so the return shipment does not accidentally include something you will want back.

What to deliberately leave behind

The physical stuff is the easy half. The harder half is what you stop doing.

Stop saving new things to the company drive that you will wish you had kept. Move the personal Substack draft off the work laptop. Take the podcast app off the work phone. From now on, anything you start should land on a personal device.

And stop carrying the team's ongoing problems home in your head. The handover is real work, but the worry is not yours past your last day. The biggest regrets people have about their last two weeks are not about what they took home — they are about who they did not talk to.

The morning of your last day

A short pass, not a panic.

1. Final desk sweep — drawers, under the keyboard, the wall behind the monitor
2. Sign out of every personal account on the work device
3. Check the Downloads folder one more time
4. Confirm the personal contact list has the people who actually mattered
5. Hand back the laptop, badge, and any keys

If you have done the slow take-home over the previous week, this should take fifteen minutes. You will have the rest of the day for the real work — the goodbyes.

That is where the time should go. Not the box. The names. Build the list now so the day does not get away from you. It Was Great Working With You turns the calendar you already have into the list you wish you had — in less time than it takes to pack the desk.