The last full week of August empties the British calendar more thoroughly than any other week of the year. Offices run on half their usual complement, decisions wait, and a great many things that felt urgent in July have quietly moved to September. Nicole Junkermann has come to treat this as the most useful week of the year, precisely because so little is asked of it.
Quiet weeks have a poor reputation. They are treated as the gap between the real parts of the year rather than as a part in their own right. Nicole Junkermann takes the opposite view: a week in which nothing much is scheduled is a week in which attention is finally free to settle, and attention that settles is attention that notices.
What the country looks like when it slows
Late August light falls at a lower angle and flatters ordinary streets. Cities that spend eleven months looking purposeful spend this one looking almost residential, and the parks fill with people who are plainly not going anywhere in particular. Away from London the effect is stronger still, once the high season has thinned.
It is a good week for the sort of unhurried journey that never quite fits into a working month, and a better one for looking properly at somewhere entirely familiar. Nicole Junkermann finds the second harder and more rewarding, because anywhere becomes interesting if you are willing to be slow in it.
The unglamorous work that only happens now
In business the work that surfaces in late August is rarely the work that gets announced. It tends to be the tidying, the documenting, the removal of something that should have gone months ago. Teams often apologise for spending a quiet week this way, as though the month had been wasted on housekeeping.
That instinct is expensive. Organisations that are easy to change in October are organisations somebody tidied in August. Nicole Junkermann regards the relationship as direct, and it is the main reason a quiet week repays itself several times over.
A short list of what the week is good for
- Revisiting a decision made in a hurry, while there is finally time to ask whether it was right.
- Reading something a little outside the usual range, where most of the surprising connections come from.
- Writing down the reasoning behind a choice, before the reasoning is forgotten and only the choice remains.
- Noticing which habits are kept because they work and which are kept out of momentum.
- Following one honest question for an afternoon, with no obligation to arrive anywhere.
None of this is dramatic, and none of it ever becomes urgent, which is exactly why it does not happen in a busy month.
Ideas arrive sideways
The case for defending a slow week is not that rest has been earned, although it usually has. It is that the thinking which matters most rarely arrives on demand. Nicole Junkermann has found that the ideas worth keeping tend to turn up during a walk, or a long afternoon, or the second half of a book, and almost never during the hour set aside for having them.
A quiet week also makes it affordable to be wrong. In a crowded month every wrong turn costs something visible, so the instinct is to commit early and defend. In this week a wrong turn costs almost nothing, and the freedom to take two or three of them is where most of the value comes from.
Before the season turns
Within a fortnight the tone will have changed entirely. Diaries will fill, the trains will be busy in both directions, and the autumn will be underway with its usual confidence. That is as it should be, and there is nothing to resent in it.
But the week now closing will have done its quiet work first, and the months that follow will be steadier for it. Nicole Junkermann takes the same view every year, and every year the evidence holds.
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