What to Do When You're Laid Off but Still Have to Work

You found out you’re being let go. Then they told you to keep coming in for another ten weeks. Most people spend that time performing gratitude they don’t feel. That’s the wrong move.

Three things nobody tells you about the notice period:

Your severance is protected by your conduct, not your mood. They can’t take it back because you seemed checked out. They can take it back if you go hostile, breach the agreement, or stop doing the basic job. The line is what’s on record, not how much enthusiasm you fake.
You’re about to job search from the best seat there is. Still employed. Still paid. With a known end date. Employed candidates get faster replies and can negotiate without the smell of desperation. The weeks ahead are runway, not a countdown.
Your manager is building a story, not grading a performance. After a layoff, managers narrate. “They handled it like a pro” or “they made it ugly.” That sentence becomes your reference. A few visible, low-effort moves decide which one they say.

So the play isn’t to perform enthusiasm. It’s to stay clean, stay quiet, and spend the runway on yourself.

Do the visible minimum. Protect the rest.

You’ll get asked to take on more during your notice. New projects. Extra coverage. A “quick” handover that balloons. Refusing outright hands them a paper trail. Saying yes to everything burns the hours you need for your search. There’s a move between them.

Weak: “I’m being laid off. Why would I do that?” That’s the ugly story, written by you, in Slack, where it stays.

Strong: “Happy to help where I can with the time I’ve got left. To take the new project I’d need to drop the handover doc or push it a week. Which matters more to you?” You stayed cooperative on record. You protected your hours. You made them do the prioritizing. Nothing to point at later.

Back in the office after a Zoom layoff: keep it flat. Normal hellos. No speech, no campaign for sympathy. The less you perform, the less anyone has to react to.

A teammate you like is stressed about absorbing your work: be kind and hand it over clean. Don’t vent, don’t offload your feelings onto them. You protect the relationship and the reference in one move.

They ask you to sign a “voluntary resignation”: read it first, at home. Voluntary resignation can change your unemployment eligibility. Don’t sign anything new in the room because someone’s waiting.

One rule for the whole period: put nothing in writing you wouldn’t want read back to you. Every message you send is part of your file now. Vent offline, to people who don’t work there.

Tonight:

Reread your separation terms and find exactly what triggers a clawback. It’s almost always misconduct, almost never effort.
Start the search from the employed seat this week. Refresh your resume while you still have your wins and your logins. Get your resume ready to send.
Decide your handover scope and write it down for yourself, so you’re not improvising when someone asks for more.
Pick the story you want your manager to tell, and do the two or three quiet things that make it true.

The layoff isn’t the test. The weeks after the news are. Here’s the full playbook for preparing before it happens.

Reply and tell me where you are in your notice period. I’ll tell you the one move that matters most for your spot.