"In recent years, I’ve come to believe that the decision to treat the pacing of cognitive jobs like manufacturing jobs was a mistake."

"We seemed to have forgotten that life in the mills and factories was miserable.... And yet, as more of us shifted into the comparable comfort of office buildings, we carried over the same flawed model forged on the factory floor.... The process of producing value with the human brain — the foundational activity of many knowledge sector roles — cannot be forced into a regular, unvarying schedule...."

Writes Cal Newport, in "To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality" (NYT).

Strategies to vary pace, however, don’t need to be explicitly seasonal. The software development company Basecamp asks its employees to consolidate their work into cycles that last six to eight weeks and are focused on a small number of clear goals.... Organizations might consider adapting the idea of sabbaticals from academia.... This idea of paid sabbaticals is slowly starting to catch on in corporate settings. The email marketing company AWeber, for example, offers a four-week paid leave to those with a decade or more of service...."

Four-week paid leave? That's just vacation. The only reason not to call it vacation is that vacations have been so stingy. Sabbatical. Four weeks? Give me a break.

Maybe you won’t convince your boss of the value of seasonality. But not every strategy of this type requires buy-in at the organizational level. There are also more surreptitious ways to gain some of the benefits of this approach....

This is the idea of "quiet quitting," and the article warns you to be sneaky about it: 

While permanent quiet quitting will almost certainly be noticed and frowned upon, temporarily keeping your head down and sidestepping more commitments than usual probably will not. 

Most people are probably already deploying this strategy on occasion.... So why not make it a more regular part of your routine? You could, for example, schedule an intentional slowdown every July or in the month leading up to the Christmas break....

The suggestion is to put more structure — more "seasonality" — to your haphazard slacking and balking. And there's no hint that you're doing anything you should feel guilty about. You're improving your work, according to the author, whose book is called "Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout."