Oh to be in the office, now that August's there . . . I can't sustain the verse beyond this first line as I'm no good at poetry, writes Lucy Kellaway.

But the rapture Robert Browning felt over the brushwood sheaf and the chaffinch can't be that dissimilar to my own delight at the sights and sounds of working life in the dead of summer.

Rather than convey my rapture in verse, I have composed a prosaic list to elucidate what it is that makes the office in August quite so lovely.

-  Joyous commute. You emerge from your front door to find the city quiet. Commuters have seats on tubes and buses. Cyclists whiz down empty roads. Possibly there are only 20 per cent fewer commuters, but because of the funny effect that change has at the margin, it feels as if there is almost no one going to work at all;

- Favourable shift in chief/ Indian ratios. Although lots of Indians are on the beach, an even higher percentage of chiefs are there too. This hugely contributes to the niceness of the atmosphere back in the office;

- No buzz. Buzz is something that is overrated. It's noisy and stressful. Instead, many cubicles are empty and the air is full of the gentle sounds of someone typing far away;

Light heart. From our school days, we are programmed to think that August means holidays. So if we find ourselves in the office during that month, the work we do doesn't quite count, so it is hard to get het up about anything;

- Plentiful supplies of cold Diet Coke in the vending machines;

- Moral superiority. As so many people are on holiday, simply turning up to work makes you feel like a Stakhanovite, which is nice;

- Despite the moral superiority, the day feels more leisurely. You can get in a bit late and leave a bit early. And if you can find anyone nice who is also working in August, you can have lunch together;

- Almost no e-mails and no meetings;

- No one rings. Today I have had only one call and that was from the nanny to tell me the freezer had packed up. White goods don't seem to respect the idea that August is not a good time for calamity.

Yet by far the biggest and the strangest pleasure in August is the work itself.

During this month, a depleted B-team shifts just as much work as is shifted in a normal month by a bigger, top-heavy A-team.

There is no noticeable difference in quality - the only difference is that with the B-team in charge, everyone goes home on time.

Indeed, during August the workload is whittled down to the essential bread-and-butter stuff that companies need to do to make any money. Goods get produced and sold, columns get written and newspapers published.

Not only is all this done efficiently, it leaves time for work that has been pushed to one side during the rest of the year. Last week, I even found myself tidying my desk and doing tiresome admin tasks. Even more remarkable, there is time left over to do that activity that almost never gets done in the office: to think.

How is this possible? The reason is simple. There are no new initiatives in August. No meetings to discuss diversity workshops. The biggest egos are on the beach and those left behind have too much proper work to do to engage in any posturing.

The shocking lesson from August is finding out just how much time all these other activities eat up.

But if things are so pleasant and efficient when non-work is eliminated, there must be a lesson to be drawn.

The A-team should be told to take a permanent holiday, allowing the business to be run more smoothly and with lower overheads.

It wouldn't work, alas.

If you left the B-team to get on with it, in time they would grow their own A-team.

They would introduce diversity workshops themselves and be posturing with the best of them.

Instead, the true lesson is to enjoy the office in August, because like April in England, it passes and real office life will come back soon enough.

There is one bad thing about working through the summer.

That is having to communicate with the A-team from the poolside and the beach.

In the old days, it was the person on holiday who would resent stray phone calls from the office.

Now it is the other way round. People in the office resent the frequent nuisance calls and needless BlackBerried e-mails from control freaks on holiday.

However, I've devised a little game to take the pain out of this. Send holidaying colleagues a fairly pointless e-mail and then start the stopwatch.

An out of office reply will bounce back at once. But wait. In time you surely will get an inessential reply by BlackBerry.

The faster it comes, the more points you get. Further points if they waste precious minutes of their holiday to tell you they are by the pool in Tuscany or on the beach in Corsica.

If they end with the cliché "eat your heart out", you hit the jackpot.

You don't need to eat your heart out. You are having a better time than they are. - (Financial Times service)