
I’ve been fortunate that we've closed down for the last week of the year for the last eight years that I’ve been at Buffer. We kicked off this at the end of 2016 and have kept up every year since then. Closing down for the last week of the year is an opportunity to pause and recharge. It’s like a reset, except across the whole company. I love telling people about this practice at Buffer because they have so many questions about how we continue to operate while closing down for a week.As we work with many small businesses and creators who can sometimes struggle with working over the holidays, it feels especially important to share how we’re going about this.So in this post, I’ll cover what it means to close down for a week as a business whose customers are always using it, why we do it, and specifically how our largest teams manage this time off while still caring for our product and our customers.Let’s dive in! Jump to a section: What does it mean to close down for a week? What does this look like in practice? How our Advocacy team handles a week closed How our Engineering team handles a week closed A few questions from our community about closing down for a week What does it mean to close down for a week?At the end of every year, we close down for the year's final week. The exact definition of “closed down” varies from company…