Anyone else in technology agree that since we went to Agile, we NEVER get any "cool-down period". It's supposed to be in the "IP sprint", but we always use that to "make a date" that's been handed down to us from above. In the "waterfall" days, we had a "cool-down period" during code freeze.
In this article: "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. Crucially, each cycle is followed by a two-week cool-down period in which employees can recharge and regroup by fixing small problems and taking time to consider what to tackle next. “It’s sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles into the cool-down period to fit in more work,” the Basecamp employee handbook says. “But the goal is to resist this temptation.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/opinion/creative-work-productivity-seasonality.html?smid=url-share