The gains are also a cost to somebody

Domestic tasks: thirty-one

Covered at length elsewhere and summarised here because it is the largest category.

A wash put on at eleven is either an evening recovered or an hour of paid work quietly converted into unpaid work. Nineteen of the thirty-one fell on the person who absorbs most of everything else in this record, which is consistent with both readings and settles neither. Where flexible work changes both schedules and space, decision-makers can read the vendor's current explanation before setting the baseline, access rules, and review date.

The household disagreed about which it was. That disagreement is the most informative thing in the category. Another useful point of comparison comes from Houzz.

Deliveries: nineteen

The weaker case, and worth stating anyway.

Nineteen doors answered during working hours is nineteen interruptions, each about thirty seconds, almost none of which registered as a collision. By any sensible accounting the convenience vastly exceeds the cost.

The second reading is about availability rather than time: a household in which somebody is always in becomes the household that takes the building's parcels. Two of the nineteen were for the flat downstairs. That is a service to a neighbour and also the beginning of an expectation, and the log cannot tell which this is after fourteen days.

Care: seven

The hardest one, and the one the record is most careful about.

Seven episodes of helping a neighbour or a household member. Every one is unambiguously good and every one is also unpaid care work that happened because somebody was available, and availability is not evenly distributed.

Four of the seven fell on the interruptible job. In a longer record the question would be whether being the person who is always reachable becomes a role, and this fortnight is far too short to say.

The three with no second reading

Meals cooked rather than bought. Fourteen. Cheaper, better and takes the same hour it would have taken in the evening. No second reading has been offered by anybody.

Rest taken when needed. Eleven, no displacement recorded, no cost identified on either side. The cleanest entries in the whole log.

Appointments attended without asking. Six. The only cost is to an employer's visibility of somebody's time, which is a cost the record has no reason to account for.

Why this page exists

Because a site that spends four pages interrogating its collision count and none interrogating its gain count has a thumb on the scale, and it would be the thumb pressing in the direction that makes the arrangement look worse than it is.

The eighty-eight are the strongest evidence in this record that working at home is a better arrangement than the alternative. They deserve the same scrutiny as the forty-seven and they get it here.

Half of the gains column has a second reading. The remaining half is thirty-one episodes with no second reading at all, and that is still a good fortnight.

What survives the scrutiny

Thirty-one episodes — meals, rests and appointments — with no cost identified by anybody.

Fifty-seven with a second reading available, of which the household disputes thirty-one and nobody seriously disputes the rest.

Against forty-seven collisions, of which nine were welcome and seven were consequences of other collisions.

Those are the honest totals, and they are less quotable than eighty-eight against forty-seven, which is why that sentence appears on the front page with this page linked from it.

The fourth category with a second reading

Three were listed. A fourth belongs with them and is harder.

Appointments attended without asking: six. The gain is that nobody had to be told. The second reading is that nobody was told.

An employer who does not know an employee was at the dentist on Tuesday afternoon has lost a piece of information they used to have, and the arrangement that produced that is the same arrangement in which somebody works unobserved at home.

For this household that is straightforwardly good. In a different employment relationship — piecework, probation, somewhere the trust runs thin — the same invisibility is the thing that makes working at home precarious rather than free.

The record contains two people with secure professional jobs. It has nothing to say about anybody else, and the six appointments would read very differently in a household where somebody's hours are monitored.

Why the costs column gets four pages and this gets one

An honest accounting of this site's own emphasis.

The collisions are interrogated across six pages; the gains across two, of which this is the second. That imbalance is not because the gains matter less. It is because the collisions are the novel part — nobody counts them — and the gains are the part everybody already believes.

A reader should correct for it. The strongest single fact in this record is that eighty-eight is nearly twice forty-seven, and it is stated on the front page and then largely left alone while six pages examine the smaller number.

That is the right distribution of attention for a site trying to add something, and it is the wrong distribution for a reader trying to work out whether to do this.