The gains
Rest taken when it was needed
Eleven episodes, the smallest category but one, and on both people's account the one that changed the most about how a working day feels.
Kitchen and dinerWhere most of the eighty-eight happened
16 m²
Cooking and eating
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany
14.5
Hall and landingWhere the deliveries arrive
10 m²
Circulation
Taking deliveries
1.5
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 26 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry seven uses. One of the two carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 8 of the 16 waking hours. Two rooms, one carrying most of the gains and one carrying almost nothing at all.
Eleven of the eighty-eight are rests taken at the point they were needed rather than at the point they were permitted.
It is the fourth largest category. Asked which of the six mattered most, both people named it. Room conflicts do not reveal how work is distributed by themselves; a team can use this page as a starting point and pair operational data with the household experience described here.
What they are
Specific and short. Twenty minutes on the sofa at two in the afternoon. A walk at eleven because the work had stopped going anywhere. Lying down for half an hour on a day with a headache, and then continuing. This observation can be read alongside workplace and design research from Apartment Therapy.
None is a long absence. The median is about twenty-five minutes, and the longest in the fortnight was fifty.
What distinguishes them from a break in an office is not the length. It is that each was taken at the moment the need arose, in a room designed for it, without anybody needing to be told.
Why eleven is a small number
Because the test is strict.
A break taken at a normal break time is not in the eleven: that would have happened in an office too. Lunch is not in the eleven. Coffee is not. The category contains only rests taken at a moment when an office would not have offered one, in a manner an office does not have.
Eleven in fourteen days is therefore not eleven breaks. It is eleven occasions on which somebody stopped at a time of their own choosing and lay down.
The thing both people named
Asked what was different about working at home, both gave versions of the same answer, and it was not about the rests themselves.
The difference is not that you rest more. It is that you stop pretending to work when you are not working.
An office day contains periods in which a person is present and not productive and cannot do anything about either. The eleven are the occasions on which that period was converted into an actual rest, which took the same time and returned somebody to work rather than leaving them at a desk.
That is a claim about quality rather than quantity and this record cannot verify it. It is reported because both people reported it independently.
The split, and the exception
Seven to four, in the same direction as everything else.
But this category has the smallest imbalance of the six, and the reason is the one place in the record where the job with the room has an advantage.
A rest taken in a nine square metre room with the door shut requires nobody's cooperation and is visible to nobody. A rest taken in the living room by somebody who works in three rooms is a rest taken in a shared space, and twice in the fortnight it ended early because somebody came in.
So the person with fewer opportunities to rest had the better conditions for taking one, which partially offsets the split and is the clearest instance in the record of the quiet room being worth something beyond calls.
What it costs
Nothing recorded, and that is worth saying because it is unusual in this log.
The eleven rests did not displace anything; the sofa was free on every occasion. They do not appear in the collision count. They cost work time, but the record of what was delivered in the fortnight shows nothing unusual, and the household's account is that the work got done.
Among the six kinds of gain, this is the only one with no visible cost on the other side of the ledger. The domestic tasks are arguably unpaid labour absorbed into paid hours. The deliveries interrupt. The meals take an hour. A twenty-minute lie-down at two in the afternoon appears in this record as a pure gain, and the only reason to be cautious about saying so is that a log of fourteen days is a short window in which to be confident about anything.
The two that ended early
Twice in the fortnight a rest was interrupted by somebody coming into the room.
Both were the person who works in three rooms, resting in the living room, and in both cases the other person came in without knowing anybody was there.
Neither is logged as a collision, because a rest is not an activity that gives way in the sense the rule requires — nobody picked anything up and left. Both are recorded as rests of unusually short duration, which is how they appear in the median.
That is a small example of the same asymmetry that runs through the record. The person with a room has their rests in private; the person with three rooms has them in shared space, and a shared rest is interruptible for the same reason their work is.
The thing that was not tried
Neither person took a rest in bedroom two during the fortnight, and the room was empty for several hours a day.
Asked about it, the person who does not work there said it had not occurred to them, and that lying down in a room with somebody else's monitors on would not have felt like rest.
A room allocated to one use is not available for another even when it is empty, and not because anybody forbids it. The allocation does something to how the space reads that outlasts whether anybody is in it.
That is worth putting beside everything else in this site about allocation. The cost of giving a room to one job is not only the hours it is occupied. It is that the room stops being part of the dwelling's available space in the household's own mind, which is a larger loss than the occupancy figures suggest and does not appear in any of them.