I Quit My Job

🗓️ August 12, 2025 | 🕒 8 min read

I quit my job today. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be my own boss. But I’ve been a slave to the system. Continuously seeking more education and job experience, thinking it would relieve me of my imposter syndrome. My GitHub is a graveyard of half-finished projects, victims of perfectionism and self-doubt. Authority has been both a friend and enemy, it’s motivated me to study hard for exams, and work to impress a boss. I’ve accomplished things under authority I never would have had the self-confidence to do on my own. But I’ve blinked and now I’m 31. My 20s were a whirlwind adventure. I became a vet, got married, moved internationally, became a software engineer, worked at Facebook, got a grad certificate from Stanford, and became a mother. I wouldn’t trade any of it for anything, but I long to work on my own ideas, untethered to a boss, with full creative freedom and financial entitlement to the result. The discomfort of cutting the cord with a steady pay check was not an easy one. I’m dreading what lays ahead of me. I’ve learned that nothing comes for free and everything is harder than what it seems. But I’m determined to give it a good go. I’m now in my 30s, with two beautiful kids, and I want them to see their Mum going after what she wants. I also want the brain space and time to be able to soak in their early years. The easy path would be to stay in a job with a comfortable, steady paycheck, but I know that I would always wonder what could have been. So here I am, drawing a line in the sand: for the foreseeable future I’m working for my family — treating my own ideas as seriously as I would a job or an exam.

I’ve learned that I need the impending doom of an exam or a performance review to kick me into gear and force me to persist through my perfectionism and imposter syndrome. So to create structure and accountability for myself, I’ll be working to a roadmap with KPIs, just like in a regular job. Each week I will post an update post about the week and how I’m tracking against the overarching goals. At the end of each half I’ll conduct a performance review and plan for the next half.

So what do you work on when you answer to nobody? It’s actually a pretty overhwleming thought. Being a cog in the machine is easy, the machine is already running, and essentially someone tells you what to do to keep it going. But when you’re working with a blank canvas, without a crystal ball, it’s very difficult to decide what on earth to do. So i took a step back and created a mindmap of everything that is important to me in my life:

Mindmap of things that are important in my life right now

The goal with this mind map is that I can track the various aspects of my life that are important to me and make an educated decision about what to work on next. I want to work on business ideas that fit with my current passions and priorities. I can also identify how working on one goal can feed into another and prioritize as such. This was such a helpful process, it allowed me to put down on paper all of my fleeting interests (of which there are an embarrassing amount) as well as goals that are the most important to me like spending quality time with my family and starting a business that can support my family. I drew connections between various interests and values. If a node has multiple incoming edges, then I know it is quite interconnected and should be valued higher. In other words, the higher degree the node, the more attention it deserves, and the more likely it is to be called out on the roadmap. For example, working on a game with my husband is connected with family (spending time with Andrew), career (starting a business/coding) and hobbies (creative drawing), therefore it should have higher importance. Cooking and meal planning is related to maintaining the home, but also relates to my weight loss goals, and hobbies, so is one of the house chores I should dedicate more time to.

From the initial mind map, I pulled out nodes that I intend to work on over this half and that will form my roadmap. I highlighted 3 different node types:

  1. North star goals — These are my most important goals, basically anything I do should be in support of these goals.
  2. Current focuses — These nodes directly support the North Star goals
  3. Non-negotiable adult stuff — Some things you just can’t ignore, like doing laundry, cooking, maintaining the house etc. Since my husband holds down a real job, it’s my responsibility to take on the role of CEO of the house.

So from the mind map, I can identify 5 domains which will be the main pillars driving everything I do and how I measure my performance:

Using that, I’ve created the following roadmap & KPIs for the remainder of H2 (ie. August-December):

Money & Career #

Money and career are collapsed for this half since they feed off of each other and are pretty interrelated. Something to note is that I’d like to find as much overlap between other goals and areas of interests and business ideas as possible.

Fitness #

The Northstar goal I identified in this section is weight loss. But it is also imperative that I make time regularly for physical activity as I notice a huge difference in my productivity and mental wellbeing when I am regularly active. Excercise is like lubrication for the mind. I also have a lot of goals that relate to physical activity.

Smaller, measurable goals that support these overarching gols are:

The plan is to do these as a fitness test, and then repeat the fitness test bi-monthly to track progress.

Family #

The most important category, but also pretty difficult to measure. Also includes some of the most mundane, non-negotiable adult responsibilities. For this quarter I can identify

Mind happiness & Wellbeing #

Nothing from this category is going to make it into my trackable goals this half, but it doesn’t mean I won’t be doing anything from that category.

How? #

The last important question here is how am I actually going to accomplish these goals… if only there were infinite hours in the day! As my youngest ramps up in daycare, the goal will be to spend 10 hours per week on work that is directly related to building a businesss or an audience. The goal is to ramp this up to 30 hours per week as he attends more daycare. I’ll be tracking my time with Toggl. Each week I will determine granular set of goals directly relating to the overarching goals, and each week I will post an update post about the week gone by, including what I spend my time on, how much time I worked, and other expected or unexpected happenings.

With that being said, my goals for the next week are:

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