August Is Secretly the Best Month to Get Things Done

August is the wrong time to take a vacation. Yes, yes, we know, the French get a decadent month-long vacation during August, an incredible luxury that nobody would turn down. But this is America, where almost a quarter of workers get no paid vacation. Even if we wanted to skip work during the dog days of summer, most of us couldn't do it. U.S. workers, on average, get just around two weeks of paid time off, according to a 2013 analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Given this scarcity, there's no reason to waste precious days off during the best month to work.

The office is pleasant during summer's last, sticky, hot, gasping breath. "Casual" is how one Bloomberg editor described it. "It's August," he said over our office chat. "Anything goes."