Can you hear those bells jingling, ring ring tingling too?
It’s mid-December. The last full week of the year for most people. In a few days, the whirlwind will start: people off, people travelling, holidays overlapping. Calls will always have someone missing. Meetings will thin out, slowly but surely.
It feels almost subconscious. After an intense year, everyone is easing off the gas. My team especially. We shipped a massive project a few weeks ago and now there’s this shared, unspoken understanding that it’s time to breathe a little. To give our nerves and brains a break after some pretty intricate weeks.
I don’t think there’s any shame in that. Actually, I think it shows maturity.
Picking your battles, planning around known slowdowns, accepting that some weeks will be disrupted — that’s part of being organised. It’s part of being sustainable.
In our case, it was fairly straightforward. The feature we released was big and impactful. We knew we’d need a buffer period: time to monitor usage, collect feedback, fix the inevitable bugs that only appear once something hits real scale. The release went well. Monitoring is in place. Tickets are slowly coming in. Now it’s about polishing, improving, refining.
We planned holidays to keep decent coverage. We planned the sprint to land here with loose ends, but nothing critical. No P0s looming. And if something unexpected happens, contingency plans are ready. So far, so good.
Does this mean it’s an extra week of paid holiday? Of course not.
This is about managing time, people, and mental energy.
The effort required for a complex launch is not sustainable long-term. Intense weeks, constant pressure, tight deadlines. They pile up. I personally enjoy that intensity, but I also know it’s not something I should be operating under all the time.
Experience taught me that those rough patches are part of the job. Necessary, even. But it’s just as important to take care of yourself and pace your work when you can.
The tickets are still there. I pick them up gladly. The difference is that deadlines aren’t as suffocating. People might be around less, responses slower, context more fragmented. And somehow, that makes the work better.
No rush. More time to think. More space to go deep. More room to explore.
Development slips back into a more natural, sustainable rhythm. Progress feels slower, more linear. In reality, it’s just different work: chiselling instead of bulldozing. Small improvements instead of big swings. Those little details that quietly make the product more solid, more refined.
The only real trap here is thinking: “Nobody’s doing anything, so why should I?”
First of all, it’s not true. Things are still moving, just at different speeds. And if the team and company are serious, work doesn’t magically stop in the second half of December. Whether you want to keep momentum or not is up to you.
Second, and more importantly, at a certain point it stops being about what others are doing. You do it for yourself. For your standards. For the quiet pride you feel at the end of the day.
If I had to sum up this week, I’d call it a precarious balancing act.
You need slow weeks to recover and recharge. But it’s still business as usual. Everything around you might feel like it’s come to a halt, yet stopping completely only makes these days drag on — and makes January hit harder than it needs to.
Slow doesn’t mean stopped. And rest doesn’t mean disengaged.