Before you close the office: a five-minute list
Two weeks of thin staffing is when the small things go wrong. Five checks, none of which takes longer than a coffee.
Between roughly 22 December and 5 January your company runs on a skeleton crew. Nothing dramatic usually happens, but the things that do go wrong in that window share a pattern: nobody was watching, and nobody was expected to be.
Five checks, five minutes total.
One: what runs while nobody is here?
If you have scheduled automations, they keep running over the holidays. Confirm that somebody would notice if one stopped — or accept that they would not, which is fine for most, and note which ones are on that list.
Two: who has the logins?
If the person who set up your tools is away for three weeks and something needs changing, can anybody else get in? The handover notes from 17 November are the durable fix; a shared password manager entry is the version you can do today.
Three: does anything expire?
Payment cards, API keys and trial periods have a habit of expiring in late December, and a failed payment over the holidays can quietly suspend a service you only notice in January.
Four: is anything renewing automatically?
The 11 December point. A contract that renews on 1 January renews while your office is empty. If you intended to renegotiate, the window is now, not in the second week of January.
Five: the out-of-office question
If you use any automatic email handling, decide explicitly what it does over the break. An assistant that drafts replies while nobody reviews them is the one configuration you do not want running unattended for two weeks.
Then stop
That is the list, and it is deliberately short. The year-end version of this subject is not a project; it is five minutes and then going home.
Whatever is unfinished will be equally unfinished on 6 January, and it will be dealt with better by people who had a proper break.