GUEST COMMENT: Two suggestions for avoiding work during August

There is almost no incentive to work at all during August. So why bother?

Fund managers are in their villas and country homes, oligarchs in their dachas or Adriatic love-nests and CEO's are on their yachts. No significant buy orders, M&A mandates or strategic decisions will be made before September.

Job-seekers can forget about any hiring decisions being made until then either. Now more than ever in this tight job market, no employment contracts are getting sent out without the sign-off of every team member who's anyone. Even the cleaner will get a say. And they won't all be in the same room until after the holidays have well and truly finished. So there's not even any point trying hard to clinch your dream job during the summer lull - it applies to career moves too.

So how can you avoid work effortlessly and without arousing suspicion in an industry notorious for face time and a (sometimes unnecessarily) hard work culture?

1. Find yourself a juicy four-week internal project - these are normally the kiss of death as they're worth very little currency in your end-of-year bonus discussion. Arguing that one has streamlined internal efficiencies for any other month of the year, especially when these tasks have very little associated revenue, is only marginally easier than staying sober throughout the Notting Hill Carnival.

Paradoxically however, August is the perfect time to put your hand in the air for such pointlessness. Whoever is supposed to be running the project will probably too busy worrying about their own holiday (there are always one or two seniors stuck in the office in August and they will have made sure they have all of September off as a pay-back). They'll wear a scowl the whole time and won't pay much attention to anything. By the time they get back in October they will have forgotten about your project ever existed.

A hidden benefit of this stratagem is that for the rest of the year you can use your summer distraction as an excuse to avoid being given similar work during the eleven months during which it will come in most useful to avoid these little bonus-killers.

2. Realign yourself to your worst-performing seniors. Everyone knows who they are - the hopeless cases with non-existent P&L's, who work for the sleepiest clients and whom everyone suspects are going to pack it all in each year after another awful bonus. And yet, somehow, they have stuck it out. Perhaps their godfather is Chairman of your firm. Perhaps they are sleeping with the head of your team, but they're not fireable and they're not going anywhere by their own volition.

Volunteer to take on their projects, since they will probably be too demotivated or lazy to do any work on these themselves and will probably forget about the deadlines until it's too late, by which time they will have postponed or cancelled them outright. Meanwhile, you're sitting pretty.

Don't burn any bridges though as you'll need the support of the people you normally work for as soon as they get back.

Even if you don't try these, try something to make sure you do as little work as possible during August. You can rest assured that your bosses and clients will come back on September 6th reinvigorated and full of energy. Failure to prepare for this could be disastrous.