I Left My Job in February 2020. Three Weeks Later the World Closed.

The worst-timed decision of my career

I handed in my notice in February. The plan was ordinary: take four or five weeks off, talk to a few companies, be somewhere new by April.

Three weeks later the borders closed, hiring froze across every market I was looking at, and the four-week gap I'd planned turned into something with no visible end.

I've spent a lot of the last few months deciding what to make of that. This post is where I've landed, written mostly for the version of me who was refreshing job boards at 1am in March.

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Timing is not a skill

The first thing I had to accept is that I did not make a bad decision. I made a reasonable decision that collided with an event nobody priced in.

This distinction matters more than it sounds. If you treat bad timing as bad judgement, you draw exactly the wrong lesson — you become more cautious in a way that doesn't protect you from anything, because the next disruption won't look like this one either.

The decision to leave was right on the information I had. The outcome was worse than expected. Both of those things are allowed to be true.

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What I did first, and what I'd skip

For roughly six weeks I applied to everything. Roles I was overqualified for, roles in industries I didn't care about, roles in cities I'd never considered.

None of it worked, and in hindsight none of it could have worked. I was applying into a market that had stopped, with a CV that said nothing specific because I'd genericised it to fit every posting.

What I'd skip: the volume approach. In a frozen market, applications aren't a numbers game. There is no number.

What I'd start sooner: talking to people with no ask attached. Not "are you hiring" — just conversations with people whose work I found interesting. Almost everything useful that has happened since came out of those, and none of it arrived on the timeline I wanted.

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The question the pause forced

When the option to jump straight into the next job disappeared, a question I'd been avoiding became unavoidable: what do I actually want to be good at?

I'd built a career on the demand side — B2C lifecycle work at scale, then B2B campaigns and pipeline. I was competent across a wide surface. But I couldn't have told you what I was the obvious person to call about.

Having months rather than weeks meant I could take that seriously instead of answering it inside a notice period. The answer I keep circling back to is narrower than my CV: helping early-stage B2B companies build a demand engine that works without a large team, because that's the situation where the constraints are real and the thinking matters most.

I'm not certain yet. But I'm much less vague than I was in February.

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What I did with the months

Concretely, because "I used the time to reflect" is not useful advice:

• Rebuilt my own analysis skills properly. I'd been directionally right about funnel maths for years without being rigorous. I went back through my own past campaigns and did the arithmetic properly, including the ones that had looked successful.
• Wrote things down. Frameworks I'd been carrying in my head — how I audit a channel mix, how I'd define an ICP from a small customer base — turned out to be much shakier once written. Writing them exposed the gaps.
• Took on two small pieces of paid work. Both through people I'd talked to with no ask attached. Neither was a job. Both taught me more about what independent work actually involves than a year of reading would have.
• Learned to sit with an unresolved answer. Genuinely the hardest one, and the one I'd most want to pass on.

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Where this leaves me

I don't have a tidy ending. I'm not writing this from the other side of a resolved situation — I'm writing it from the middle, in a country I'm planning to leave, with a direction that feels right and a timeline that doesn't exist.

What I'm fairly sure of: the pause was not lost time, but it also wasn't a secret gift. It was just a period where the usual options were closed and I had to find out what I'd do without them.

If you're in a similar gap right now, the only thing I'd offer is this. Judge the decision on what you knew, not on what happened afterwards. And spend less of the time applying than you think you should, and more of it working out what you want the applications to be for.