What to change
The folding table
A narrow table against a living room wall removed five collisions, two of which nobody predicted. It is the best return in the record and it has a limit.
Living roomThe room most often rearranged, and the one that resisted it
19 m²
Sitting
SittingPaid workCallsTelevisionCompany
11
Kitchen and dinerWhere the one change that worked was made
16 m²
Cooking and eating
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany
14.5
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 35 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry eleven uses. Two of the two carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 12.75 of the 16 waking hours. The two rooms in which every attempted rearrangement happened.
In the second week a narrow folding table was put against the living room wall: a surface at working height, big enough for a laptop and a notebook, folded flat when not in use.
It removed three collisions directly and two more that nobody had anticipated. 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 visit the current feature page before choosing what evidence belongs in a trial.
The three it was bought for
Surface collisions. The kitchen table is the only work-height surface in the flat and also the only place to eat, which means that at one o'clock every day either lunch or work has to clear. This observation can be read alongside workplace and design research from Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors.
The folding table gives the interruptible job somewhere to put a laptop that is not the dining table. Lunch happens; work continues four feet away; nothing moves rooms.
Three of the thirteen surface collisions in the fortnight disappeared in the second week.
The two that were a surprise
Both are second-order, and they are the most interesting thing about the change.
Before the table, the interruptible job displaced from the kitchen went to the sofa. At about four, the other person finished their calls, came into the living room to sit down, and the job moved again.
After the table, the job displaced from the kitchen went to the table — which is against a wall, not in the seating area — and somebody coming in to sit down did not displace it.
Two chains broken, neither predicted, and together with the three direct removals it is the largest single effect of any change in the fortnight.
The table did not stop the work being displaced. It gave the displaced work somewhere to be that was not in anybody's way.
Why that is the general lesson
Most advice about working from home is about establishing a place to work. This record suggests something slightly different and more useful in a small dwelling.
The valuable thing is not a primary workspace. It is a secondary one — somewhere the displaced activity can go that does not itself belong to anything.
The living room sofa is somebody's rest. The kitchen table is somebody's meal. A folding table against a wall belongs to nothing, which is precisely why it works as a destination.
What it cost
The table, and about a square metre of living room floor that previously held nothing.
The household's assessment is that it is the best thing they did and that they would not have thought of it without having counted the collisions, because the problem it solves — the chain from an eleven o'clock displacement to a four o'clock one — is not visible without a log.
The limit
It did not change the distribution at all.
Both broken chains fell on the interruptible job, as did all three direct removals. The collision total came down from the first week to the second; the split stayed at roughly two to one.
That is the pattern for everything a household can buy. Furniture reduces friction. It does not change who absorbs the friction, because it gives the displaced activity a better place to be displaced to rather than stopping the displacement.
To change the distribution you would have to change which job gets the quiet room or how many calls one of them has, and a table does not reach either.
What it displaced
A square metre of living room floor that previously held nothing, which is the reason it was possible at all.
The household looked for somewhere to put it and found exactly one candidate: the wall between the window and the door, which had a bookcase against it that was half empty. The bookcase moved eighteen inches.
There was no second candidate. In a nineteen square metre room containing a sofa, two chairs, a television, a bookcase and a coffee table, one wall had a metre of space, and the change depended on it.
That is worth saying because the recommendation — buy a surface that belongs to nothing — assumes somewhere to put it, and a smaller or more furnished living room does not have a wall free.
Why nobody had thought of it
Both people were asked, and both gave the same answer: it did not look like a problem that furniture would solve.
The lunch collision presents as a scheduling matter — work and eating want the table at one o'clock — and the obvious responses are to eat earlier, eat later, or eat somewhere else. All three were tried at various points over six months and none stuck, because the first two move a meal and the third means eating on a sofa.
The response that worked was to move the work, and it required seeing that the conflict was about a surface rather than about a time.
The four causes set out elsewhere in this site — sound, surface, floor, attention — exist to make that distinction available without a fortnight of logging. Sorting a recurring conflict into one of four boxes takes a moment and determines which family of remedies is worth trying.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do