When deciding to resign, the thing I fear most is often not telling my supervisor about the resignation, nor waiting for final approval, but “preparing the handover materials.”

If following most people’s logic, organizing your work before leaving, creating a complete handover list so the next person can take over smoothly, should be the most natural thing; but for me, the handover has always been the most anxiety-inducing part of the resignation process, because I have a serious flaw—I take responsibility too seriously.

I always feel that since I’m leaving, I should organize everything I’ve done completely: which tasks are ongoing, which matters need follow-up, which details are prone to errors, which issues might arise in the future—everything should be written down. Ideally, the next person who receives the handover document can work entirely according to its contents without needing to ask me any questions.

But production control work can never be fully explained in a single document. Especially every time I resign, it’s almost always because the workload is too heavy. When you’re still handling current orders, chasing materials, scheduling, responding to the production line, and dealing with all kinds of emergencies every day, where is there a complete block of time to sit down and slowly organize everything?

Moreover, production control work rarely has a clean cutoff point—it’s not like you finish something today and it all ends tomorrow. Orders are still being produced, materials are still arriving, work orders are still being tracked, and delivery dates keep extending. Many things are ongoing by nature. It’s hard to tell yourself, “Okay, everything starting today will be handed over to the next person,” because as long as you haven’t left, you still have to keep handling the work in front of you.

So every time I resign, I’m almost always working while handing over, while trying to organize everything I know in my head as quickly as possible.

Yet the more I try to write everything completely, the less I know where to start. I keep wondering, should I add this? Should I include that too? What if I miss some detail? What if the next person doesn’t know how to handle something? What if problems come up after I leave and someone says, “She didn’t explain this at all”?

Sometimes it’s not even that others would actually say that—I’ve already played the scene out in my own head.

Only later did I slowly realize that this is also why I’ve always been so easily exhausted. I’m too used to equating “being responsible” with “never making mistakes,” and I desperately want to do everything perfectly, leaving nothing for others to clean up. But work has never been something one person can control all outcomes of.

Even if I really spend a lot of time creating an extremely complete handover list, it doesn’t mean the next person will work exactly the way I did. Everyone understands things differently; company systems change, orders change, the shop floor changes, and tomorrow a completely unexpected problem might suddenly appear—none of which a handover document can solve.

So this time, I started telling myself: do the handover to the extent that needs to be done.

It’s not about being irresponsible, but accepting that I truly can’t cover everything. It’s not about deliberately leaving problems behind, but acknowledging that work can never be 100% without omissions.

I’ve also started learning not to keep worrying about whether people will talk behind my back after I leave. If I’ve already organized the important matters I know, done my best to explain what needs explaining, and completed the handover within my ability, then the rest is no longer my responsibility after I resign.

I used to think resigning meant wrapping everything up neatly. Now I realize some work simply can’t have a perfect ending.

Being able to leave properly is already a kind of completion.

Perhaps for people who take responsibility very seriously, the real difficulty has never been doing things well, but accepting that some things truly can’t be done perfectly. We can take responsibility, but we don’t need to be responsible for every outcome; we can do our best, but we don’t need to demand we leave nothing undone. Learning to accept that we’re not that perfect at times may not be lowering our standards—it may simply mean finally learning to let ourselves off the hook once.

After all, life goes on after resignation.

And some things really don’t need to be carried away anymore.

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