The Sunday Night Test: How to Know If It’s Time to Move

Here's a diagnostic I use with clients weighing whether it's time to move. When Sunday evening comes around and you think about Monday morning — what do you feel? If it's neutral, or mildly positive, or the ordinary resistance anyone feels about a weekend ending — you're probably fine.

That's not a career signal. That's being a person. If it's dread — a weight in your chest, an anxiety that doesn't burn off, a feeling of being trapped — that's data. And if it's been dread for more than 3 months straight, that's not a phase.

That's a pattern. The test isn't definitive, and that's not its job. Its job is honesty. Most self-assessment about work runs through the rationalizing machinery — the salary, the title, the sunk years, what you'd tell people.

The Sunday feeling runs underneath all of it. Your body keeps a better scorecard than your rationalizations. Two cautions before you act on it. First: dread tells you something is wrong — it doesn't tell you what. I've watched leaders quit over what turned out to be a fixable calendar: obligations that had barnacled onto the role over years and could have been scraped off in a month.

Feelings are valid. Feelings without data produce decisions that look good for about 6 months. Second: one bad Sunday after a brutal week is noise. Write the feeling down, date it, and read the entries cold after a month.

The pattern is the signal. The entry is just weather. So: this Sunday, notice. Write one line. Do it again next Sunday. You're not deciding anything yet — you're building the file that makes the decision honest when it comes.