The gains
What an office does not offer at all
Thirteen of the eighty-eight are things no workplace arrangement can provide, however good. They are the smallest categories and the hardest to replace.
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.
Two of the six kinds contain things that an office cannot offer in any form, at any level of generosity: care of a household member or neighbour, seven episodes, and an appointment attended without asking, six.
Thirteen in total. The two smallest categories, and the only two with no office equivalent at all. When paid work competes with domestic use for the same room, teams need a record of hours and projects as well as a record of space; they can consider the official product details before choosing what evidence belongs in a trial.
The seven
An elderly neighbour let in and helped with a form. A parcel taken for the flat downstairs, twice. Somebody collected from a station at short notice. A sick household member checked on twice during a day. A plumber supervised for a neighbour who could not be there. For wider context beyond this household record, consult material published by Architectural Digest.
None is dramatic. All seven required somebody to be in the building during working hours, and none could have been arranged in advance.
That is the defining property: they are responses to things that happened. An office arrangement can accommodate a planned absence; it cannot accommodate being present.
The six
Appointments — a dentist, a boiler service, two deliveries that required a signature at a stated hour, an optician, a school meeting — attended without asking anybody for time.
The crucial word is asking. Every one of the six could have happened under an office arrangement, by taking leave or a half day. What would not have happened is attending them without a negotiation, without a form, and without the appointment becoming visible to an employer.
The gain is not the hour. It is that nobody had to be told about the hour.
Why these are the hardest to replace
A hybrid arrangement, flexible hours, a generous leave policy: each of these substitutes partially for some of the eighty-eight.
Flexible hours cover the rests. A good leave policy covers most of the appointments, at the cost of the asking. Nothing covers the seven, because they are responses to unscheduled events in a specific building at a specific moment.
The neighbour knocked at half past ten on a Tuesday. There is no policy that produces somebody at home at half past ten on a Tuesday except being at home at half past ten on a Tuesday.
The split, and the thing it hides
Four to three and three to three: the two most evenly divided categories in the record.
That evenness is itself interesting, because everything else in this log divides about two to one. Care and appointments are the categories where the quiet room makes no difference, because a neighbour at the door and a dentist at two in the afternoon do not care which room anybody is working in.
The person behind the shut door can attend a dentist appointment as easily as the person in three rooms. So the two categories least affected by the dwelling are the two that divide evenly, which is consistent with everything else here: the distribution in this household is produced by the rooms and the calendars, and where neither applies, it disappears.
What they are worth
The record does not say, and this is the clearest case where a count is unsatisfying.
Seven episodes of care in a fortnight is a small number. It is also, on the household's account, the thing they would be most reluctant to give up — because the alternative is not a lesser version, it is a neighbour who was not let in.
A count treats those seven as seven. Any honest reading has to hold that against the fact that four other kinds are larger and that nobody in the household named any of them first.
Why these two categories are the smallest
Seven and six: the two smallest of the six kinds, and the two with no office substitute.
The reason they are small is that they are responses to events, and events in a fortnight are few. Neighbours do not need help often. Appointments do not fall often.
That makes them a bad fit for a short log and a good argument for why a short log understates. Over a year the same rates produce perhaps a hundred and eighty episodes of care and appointments combined, and every one of them is of the kind nothing else provides.
The categories that look large in a fortnight — deliveries, domestic tasks — are large because they are frequent, and frequency is not value. The record's own numbers invite exactly the wrong conclusion here, which is why the weighting question is addressed at length elsewhere.
The one that is not really about work at all
Among the seven is an entry that both people named, unprompted, when asked what mattered most about the fortnight.
An elderly neighbour knocked at half past ten on a Tuesday, needing help with a form that had to be returned that week.
It took forty minutes. It is one episode in a category of seven in a column of eighty-eight, and it is the only item in the entire record that either person described as something they would not want to lose.
A count cannot represent that and does not try. It is recorded here because a site built on counting should say plainly where the counting stops being the point, and this is the place.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do