Stephen A. Smith said enough was enough.

The host of ESPN’s “First Take” was burning the candle at both ends with his myriad duties for the Worldwide Leader, and it was taking its toll.

“The tipping point for the first time arrived this year,” Smith told The Ringer’s Bill Simmons on his podcast Wednesday. “I’m not one of those guys, Bill, where it’s ‘SportsCenter,’ it’s ‘[NBA] Countdown,’ it’s ‘First Take’ — that doesn’t phase me at all. I can do those things and it’s not a problem. It’s the time in between.”

The hot take aficionado lamented waking up at 7 a.m. to begin his day and being on ESPN’s Bristol, Conn. campus until midnight on game nights.

“You’re sitting around for like four or five hours to do three minutes of television after you were all on television all morning and start of the afternoon,” Smith said. “That was too much. And for the first time in my career, I went to the bosses and I was like, ‘Yo, I can’t do this. Not this.’

“For the first time in my career, it was like… I can’t do this again. Not this,” Smith said while appearing on the Bill Simmons Podcast released on Wednesday. “I could, you know – SportsCenter, First Take – that’s a given. But to spend so many hours in the afternoon after spending so many hours in the morning on a job, that was the tipping point for me.”

The busy days caused problems at home, where his daughters didn’t get enough of his attention.

“You know my daughters jumped all up in me and they were like, wait a minute now,” he said, “‘Where you at? We usually go out to dinner, you know? Where you been? What about our movie dates?'”

Smith decided he had to reel it in and “take out some time for me” — which he plans to do this upcoming NBA season.

It won’t be an easy transition for the former New York sports columnist.

Smith turned to ESPN radio in 2005, where his career really took off, being heavily featured on TV ever since, except for a brief hiatus in 2009.

“I was unemployed from four different jobs down to zero,” Smith said of where his motivation comes from.

“When you’re working at ESPN, and you didn’t pull a Bill Simmons where you accomplished multiple streams of revenue, and you’re innovative and creative enough so you’re not dependent on one employer, at that point, I was dependent on one employer.”

Smith said that he felt blackballed by many companies that would not hire him after his ESPN departure in 2009.

“There is not one single day that goes by where I don’t remember when I was unemployed, and everyone was writing [me off] and saying I was finished. I will never forget that feeling, and that’s part of the reason why I work. I work like I’m broke,” Smith explained.

Simmons knows what Smith has gone through, having taken a similar path in his sports media career.

The Ringer founder started a blog when the internet culture was in its infancy in 1998, working his way up to ESPN writer and featured voice.

“At the end of the 2000s… I started to get momentum and I wanted to grab everything because I was like ‘I don’t know if this is ever going to happen again…'” Simmons said of landing a job at ESPN in the early 2000s. “I felt like I hit a tipping point [in] that 2013-2014 range where I was doing too many things.”