Reclaiming the Holidays: Stay Present During Busy Season, One Moment at a Time

The holidays always creep up faster than I expect. One minute, I’m picking out wrapping paper with my kids; the next, it feels like half the season has already blown past. I used to accept that rush as inevitable. December compresses a month’s worth of moments into a quick highlight reel I can barely watch. But the truth is, the season doesn’t have to feel like a time-lapse. With a tiny spotlight of attention and a few changes, we can reclaim how it feels. You get to choose which moments stay blurry and which ones become real memories.

If you’re in tech—maybe you’re sprinting through year-end releases while the holiday rush swells—you know how hard it is to stay present during busy season. At work, it’s deadline after deadline, screens stacked with tabs, bouncing from one “critical” task to another. Sometimes it’s hard to spot productivity theater early. The holidays often feel the same: one activity after another, rushing from moment to moment without ever really living inside any of them.

I caught myself zoning out at the dinner table last week. My kids were cracking up over the shape of a burned cookie, and for a second I was more focused on the next day’s meeting schedule than their laughter. I stopped, took a deep breath, and forced myself to really notice.

The sound of forks clinking, cinnamon on the air, their grins, the fact that we all had nowhere else to be. For five minutes, I let myself be genuinely grateful for ordinary things, not just the Instagram-worthy ones. It’s simple. Notice every sound, scent, and smile, and express gratitude for the moment. That tiny reset restored a sense of warmth and clarity I hadn’t even realized I was missing.

For me, it’s about slowing down for my kids. No matter how busy things get, I want them to know they’re worth my full focus—not just the leftovers, not just when the work is done. Being present isn’t just sentimental. It’s practical. These small pauses make me less scattered everywhere else.

Here’s the thing. What I do at home works just as well at work. This week, you’ll see how a 5-minute micro-presence reset can become a reliable tool to help you stay present during sprints—right at your desk.

You Can't Slow Down Time, But You Can Change How It Feels

We talk about time like it’s just something you measure. A deadline here, a calendar event there. But how much of it do you actually feel? That’s determined by your attention, not the clock. Attention is the lens that can make hours blur past, or stretch them out into something tangible. The more often we tune into the passage of time, the longer we actually experience it to be. It’s a real shift in perception. Basically, if you notice more, it adds up to living more.

If you’re technical, try thinking about presence like reducing system thrash. Less swapping between tasks, more steady throughput. When we're approaching a task with energy, time flies, but when we pull back a bit, time seems to slow. The right kind of focus lets you actually experience the work, instead of letting it slip past unnoticed.

Maybe this sounds too simple. I get it. Taking five minutes feels expensive when you’re juggling priorities. But if you’re like me, you’ve realized that even short breaks create measurable, if subtle, positive effects on our well-being. These micro-presence resets really do matter. They don’t hurt your delivery. They help you stop making avoidable mistakes and cut down on rework.

The turning point is catching yourself and choosing to stop time blur. Noticing that you’ve zoned out—that’s the first step to reclaiming it and deciding when to pause vs push.

Those five-minute resets aren’t complicated. Try one between tasks, before standups, after code reviews—anywhere you catch yourself speeding up. If you ever find yourself in a whirlwind (like I did with my kids and those cookies), that’s your cue. The small pause you give is what stretches out the lived moment and makes it matter.

5-Minute Micro-Presence Reset: From Blur to Being Here

Step one. Pause the mental clock. If you notice your brain auto-piloting through calendar invites, code toggles, or “I’ll deal with that after release” loops, break autopilot distractions by interrupting the cycle. It’s not about stopping work entirely. It’s about halting those future simulations for a minute. Take an actual pause. Say to yourself, “Right now, just notice.” Dropping the mental noise gives you a clean slate to build presence.

Next, tune your senses. Right where you are—desk, kitchen counter, couch—pick three inputs. One you see, one you hear, one you feel. For me at lunchtime, it’s the play of sunlight on mugs, the hum of the fridge, and the mild chill from the window glass. Say them out loud or silently. “Blue mug. Humming fridge. Cold window.” I find this process strangely grounding.

Sometimes I catch myself glossing over my desk environment completely, but naming specifics pulls me out of autopilot. You might notice the tap of your keys, the smell of coffee, or the feel of your hoodie. This is basic sensory attention, but you’ll be surprised how it yanks your mind into the present—a moment engineers know as context switching, but this time you’re switching into reality, not into another file.

Then, spend a couple breaths to savor small moments with micro-gratitude. It doesn’t have to be profound, or even “gratefulness” in a deep sense. Just let yourself acknowledge what’s nice—maybe the comfort of holding a mug, or a co-worker’s dumb joke from Slack. Let that tiny warmth expand and turn gratitude into action. Even this quick shift can change how you process the next chunk of your day.

Now, protect your attention. Five minutes is short, but it’s enough to be hijacked by scrolling, quick dopamine hits, or mindless background TV. For this reset, skip the YouTube algorithm and the doomscrolling. Give your brain actual quiet, and you’ll notice—presence settles in. Honestly, I still cave to distraction sometimes—yesterday I spent half my "reset" reading a comment thread about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The difference when I skip the trap is obvious. Time stretches just a bit.

Finally, make a mini-commitment. Choose one concrete, next action to step into when you’re done. Instead of loading up three new tabs or tackling half the backlog, pick the single most important thing. Whether it’s responding to a teammate, pushing a PR, or sitting through standup with actual focus. I use this reset during standup all the time; after a zone-out, five minutes gets me back for meaningful contributions. If you doubted the time cost, consider this: the return you get—in restored attention, steadier work, and not missing life as it unfolds—is real.

This whole protocol is simple on paper, but the impact sneaks up on you. If you’re stuck, try a quick three-step reset. Try it once today, whenever you catch yourself zoning out—in the office, at home, at midnight during the last code push of the year. What you’ll feel isn’t just “slower time,” but fuller living. And isn’t that what this season is supposed to be about?

Micro-Presence Reset in the Flow of Holiday Engineering

Before a standup or a handoff, I try to check myself. Am I already half-distracted, running through tasks in my head? That’s my cue to hit pause for a micro-reset. Five minutes isn’t much, but it’s enough to take in people’s faces, the tone in their voices, even the way priorities feel different when you’re paying attention. The thing is, framing cuts down the back-and-forth cycle, and you end up with less thrash, more clarity. Every time I do this, the standup runs smoother, misunderstandings shrink, and priorities click into place faster. It's such a small shift, but over a sprint, it changes everything.

Same goes for debugging or running model validations. The urge is always to move fast. Scroll past warning logs and hope for green checks. But when I use the reset to sit with the data longer, details jump out: a misplaced decimal, a warning I’d overlooked, a weird outlier that’s actually the root cause. Pattern recognition slows down, and suddenly, anomalies aren’t just noise—they’re visible. This echoes the sensory tuning I practice at home, just sharper and more technical.

During launches, I used to think I couldn’t spare five minutes to stay present during busy season before hitting deploy. But pausing to breathe and actually walk through the checklist—one step at a time—has saved me from dumb mistakes and missing obvious gaps. I can admit, I’ve shipped my share of avoidable bugs by rushing builds. Now, giving my attention one last reset means fewer regrets in the postmortem and, honestly, a quieter mind before moving on.

The blur isn’t just inevitable noise. There are places to anchor, even in the crunch. That five-minute reset is my go-to, and every time work speeds up, I look for reasons to use it. Sometimes the reset is just noticing I missed the Advent calendar and laughing instead of spiraling—like I did last night.

Making Presence Repeatable (Without Losing Momentum)

Let’s be honest. There’s always the worry that pausing will slow things down or come off as too simple. Here’s the flip side. Presence reduces cognitive load and strengthens focus. Imperfect reps compound over time—especially when you stay present under pressure during high-pressure weeks. And allow yourself to not be perfect at this—it’s a practice.

I came back to those holiday moments with my kids on purpose. The five-minute pause didn’t make the cookies less burnt, or the year end any slower. But it did make us laugh harder and remember more. Trust yourself to reclaim lived moments—at work or at home. Small resets are where the real season lives.