I laid off half a dozen good people in 2001 — a miserable experience that made me cynical about work for a long time. After that event, I made this pledge: Work was work and my life was my life, and I was going to keep those two realities apart from each other. I wasn’t going to pal it around much with my co-workers in my off hours and I wasn’t going to bring up work very often with my away-from-work friends, few of whom have any connection to journalism.

Tomorrow is my last day at USA Today and as it approaches, I realize I utterly failed to keep my pledge. I’m going to miss my co-workers at a personal level, and although I am really excited about my new job at NPR, I am leaving my old post with some regret.

USA TODAY was the company where I thought I’d end my journalism career. However, I eventually came to believe that if I stayed, my prediction might come true — about 10 or 15 years sooner than I wanted.

And so, as I wrote in my Facebook status today, I closed a door and am about to open a window. I probably have ended my days of working for newspaper companies — a thought that would have been unfathomable to me when I graduated from college some 27 years ago. And now I move to a place that isn’t beholden to stockholders and advertisers, that thinks about the news first and not whether a project has “revenue attached,” that has made a clear and obvious commitment to digital journalism. And as a result, I’m not going to worry so much about keeping my work life away from the rest of my life.