8 Tips for Keeping Projects on Track During Holidays

Project timelines don’t care about holidays, which is obvious but still annoying. Clients expect deliverables, deadlines stay fixed, and work needs to happen even when half the team is gone. The stretch between Thanksgiving and the New Year creates problems that can wreck well-planned projects if nobody prepares for it. Team capacity drops dramatically as people take vacation days, while those who remain often operate at reduced productivity levels.

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The combination of fewer available resources and compressed schedules makes this period particularly challenging for project managers. Understanding how to navigate these seasonal obstacles requires proactive planning and realistic expectations. Here are eight practical strategies to help you maintain momentum and meet your commitments during the busiest time of year.

Build Holiday Time Into Initial Planning

Most project managers plan timelines without thinking about major holidays, which is a mistake everyone makes at least once. A project scheduled to wrap in December, based on a given number of days to completion, needs to account not only for the fact that the actual number of business days will be lower due to official holidays, but also for productivity dropping hard during the last two weeks of the year. Any end-of-year project will always lose two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s since so many people take time off.

Adding buffer time matters beyond just official holiday dates. The cold and flu season hits worst during winter, snow days affect certain regions, and people stretch their vacation by taking extra days around holidays. Projects scheduled tightly without a cushion almost always miss deadlines. The timeline looks aggressive on paper, but it’s not how things actually work.

Get Everyone’s Schedule Early

Waiting until November to find out who’s gone in December creates unavoidable problems due to the small number of working days remaining till the end of the year. Having half the team on leave means calculating how many business days are left to do a task gets tricky, given that some days have to be counted as half-days instead. Get everyone’s holiday schedule on the shared calendar as soon as possible. The earlier this information gets collected, the better managers can shuffle work around and reset expectations.

Some team members book holiday travel months ahead. Others wait until the last minute, then suddenly they’re gone for ten days. Setting a deadline for vacation requests helps, but emergencies and family stuff will always create exceptions, though. The goal is getting advance notice about who’s unavailable and when, even if it’s not perfect information.

Prioritize What Actually Matters

Not everything needs finishing before the holidays; that’s just reality. Sit down with stakeholders and separate must-complete stuff from tasks that can slide into January without real problems. There’s a difference between wrapping up loose ends and trying to force every single open project to completion over the next few weeks.

This requires honest conversations about priorities, which people sometimes avoid. Marketing campaigns launching in January don’t need final approval in December if the creative team is depleted. Software releases can wait when testing resources are unavailable. Client deliverables with hard deadlines obviously take precedence over internal projects with flexible timelines; that part’s clear.

Front-Load Critical Work

Specific project deliverables that absolutely must be completed before year-end should get scheduled earlier, not later. Can the work be front-loaded? If yes, then start working on them now so you have more business days to spare in case things do not go as planned, and to achieve more relaxing holidays. Pushing critical tasks to early December instead of mid-December provides a buffer when delays happen, which they will.

This means having difficult conversations in October about December deadlines. Teams resist starting work early because other priorities feel urgent right now. Project managers need to push back on that thinking and emphasize that waiting until the last minute guarantees problems, even when people don’t want to hear it.

Communicate More Than Usual

Holiday periods require more check-ins and status updates than regular weeks. Maybe it feels excessive, but it’s necessary. Put all important information into an email to reiterate and confirm what was discussed, creating a paper trail of important deadlines that were agreed upon by HSI. People’s attention shortens during holidays, memories get fuzzy about what was actually decided, and commitments get forgotten.

Automated reminders help here. Project management software sends notifications when deadlines approach or when key team members return from time off. This removes manually track everyone’s schedules and reduces the chance that something slips through cracks, which happens more than it should during busy periods.

Prepare Handoff Documentation

Leave clear notes on what’s being worked on and where to pick up when getting back to work. Coming back from a week off with unclear project status wastes time that could be actual work instead. Detailed task lists and current priorities, and open issues should be documented before anyone leaves, even when it feels tedious.

This benefits the person leaving and whoever might cover their work. An emergency arises while someone is on vacation, another team member can step in without starting from scratch. Even when no emergency happens, clear documentation makes returning less overwhelming, which matters for productivity that first week back.

Accept Reduced Productivity

Fighting reality doesn’t change reality; it’s a pretty simple concept. When there are lots of people out of the office, run rates get reduced by PM. Projects slow down during major holidays; that’s how it works. Accepting this allows better planning rather than pretending normal productivity will magically continue when it won’t.

Some industries shut down completely during certain periods. Manufacturing closes between Christmas and New Year because keeping production lines running with skeleton crews doesn’t make economic sense. Service businesses are slow to crawl when clients are unavailable, which is most of them. Pushing against these patterns creates frustration without producing results, and just makes everyone miserable.

Plan the Return

Coming back from holidays has its own challenges that people forget about. Do the work the days before leaving for holidays so the first days back aren’t so scary. Spending the last work day before vacation setting up tasks for return makes reentry smoother, even when the instinct is just to coast out.

Blocking time on the calendar for the first day or two back helps. Meetings immediately upon return consume time that could be spent catching up on emails, reviewing project status, and getting back up to speed. Having buffer time scheduled prevents double-booking and reduces the stress of jumping straight back into full intensity work mode.

Conclusion

The post-holiday period often brings renewed energy, actually. People return refreshed and ready to tackle work with a new perspective. Things that felt overwhelming in December become manageable in January and take fewer working days than anticipated. Taking advantage of that fresh energy requires having clear plans ready to execute rather than spending the first week just figuring out what needs to be done, which wastes the momentum.

Holiday project management isn’t complicated, really. It’s mostly common sense applied consistently, planning ahead instead of reacting to predictable situations that happen every single year. Accepting some slowdown is inevitable rather than fighting it, as productivity will somehow stay normal. Teams that prepare for holidays keep projects moving despite reduced availability. Teams pretending holidays won’t affect anything end up scrambling and missing deadlines they could have adjusted months earlier if they’d been realistic about it.