How to make the most of the holiday IT slowdown

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is the closest thing most IT pros get to a maintenance window that doesn’t require begging for approval. Users are out, ticket volume drops to a trickle, and for once you can actually focus on work that keeps getting pushed to “someday.”

Of course, quiet doesn’t mean vacation. If you’re reading this, you’re probably the one holding down the fort while everyone else is enjoying holiday leftovers. You’re likely working with a skeleton crew—or maybe you are the skeleton crew. Vendor support is running light, and if something breaks, you’re fixing it with whoever happens to be around.

That’s the trade-off, but it’s also an opportunity. The trick is knowing which projects benefit most from reduced activity and which ones will just ruin your week.

Maintenance that benefits from low activity

Some tasks are genuinely safer or more practical when nobody’s logged in. These are the projects worth prioritizing during the slowdown.

Backup validation and DR testing. You’ve been meaning to verify that your backups actually restore, not just that the jobs successfully complete. Well, now’s your chance. Spin up a test recovery, confirm your critical data is intact, and document what you find. Lack of testing is a top reason disaster recovery plans fail in real disasters. The holiday slowdown gives you a window to move from “the backup ran” to “I know this works.”

Active Directory cleanup. Stale accounts, orphaned group memberships, and permissions that nobody remembers granting accumulate faster than anyone wants to admit. Reviewing who still has access to what is the kind of unglamorous work that pays dividends when audit season rolls around. Some IT teams treat the holidays as an unofficial Active Directory spring cleaning, tackling ghost accounts and GPO settings while users aren’t generating new requests.

Security housekeeping. It’s so much easier to do credential audits, review admin rights, and rotate service account passwords that haven’t been touched in years when you’re not worried about locking someone out mid-workflow. If you’ve been putting off an external vulnerability scan, the holiday slowdown is a good time to run one and actually look at the results.

Deferred patching. Are you running any systems, particularly creaky legacy apps, that you couldn’t touch during business hours because the downtime window was never long enough? You’ve got one now. Prioritize anything that’s been sitting in your backlog, especially edge devices and internet-facing systems, where delays carry more risk.

Network infrastructure updates. You may find the end-of-year break is an ideal opportunity for firmware updates, firewall rule changes, and VLAN reconfigurations. Brief outages might be a deal-breaker during normal operations, but you’ve likely got more slack during this time of year.

Non-urgent work that’s been waiting for quiet time

If you’ve already knocked out your maintenance priorities (in which case, good on you) or if you want to balance some hands-on work with lower-risk tasks, the holiday slowdown is also ideal for projects that require uninterrupted focus.

Documentation updates. Runbooks, network diagrams, and DR procedures have a way of drifting from reality. You can prevent future headaches by updating them while the details are fresh, or at least while you have time to dig into what’s actually configured. Write documentation for the person who’ll be troubleshooting these systems, which may not be the person who built the system.

Vendor and contract review. Q1 renewals are coming, so use the quiet time to audit what’s up for negotiation, identify shelfware you’re paying for but not using, and prep your talking points before the account reps start calling.

Planning for the year ahead. When the ticket queue isn’t constantly interrupting you, it’s easier to plan what you want to accomplish in the coming year and identify what resources you’ll need to make it happen.

Setting realistic holiday IT goals

If you’re really dialed in and have a full pot of coffee, you might be tempted to create an ambitious list and power through it. After all, these golden windows when nobody’s bothering you are few and far between. But holiday maintenance works best when you’re realistic about what you can actually accomplish with limited staff and support.

Pick two or three wins. What would make the biggest difference when everyone returns in January? Focus there first. You can always tackle more if time allows, but starting with a manageable scope means you’re more likely to finish what you start.

Communicate what you’re doing. If you report to an IT Director, give them a heads-up on your plans. If you’re the IT Director, loop in whoever needs to know—your CFO, a fellow manager, or whoever covers for you in a crisis. Even a quick Slack message or email documenting your intentions helps if something goes sideways. And if you’re a true solo operator with no one to report to during the holidays, at minimum leave yourself clear notes on rollback points and what state you’re leaving things in.

Build in buffer time. As you know, maintenance work doesn’t always go as planned. That backup restore might reveal a problem you need to fix, or that patch might require a reboot you weren’t planning on. So, leave room for the work to take longer than your best-case estimate. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you know this is what Scotty used to do when giving Captain Kirk an ETA on when the Enterprise’s systems would be back up and running.

Know when good enough is the right call. You don’t have to finish everything perfectly. A backup that’s been tested is better than one that hasn’t, even if you didn’t get to test every system. Progress beats perfection when you’re working with limited time and staffing.

Set yourself up for a smoother Q1

The holiday slowdown is one of the few windows where IT gets to be proactive instead of reactive. Use it well, and January looks different: fewer surprises, fewer “why didn’t we catch this sooner” conversations, and a little more breathing room before the next fire starts. You probably won’t remember the week you spent validating backups, but that’s the point. The best maintenance is the kind nobody notices because nothing broke.