What to change
The one-page version
Everything on this site, compressed to what somebody with two jobs in a small flat could use this week.
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.
This is the whole of it, for a household that is not going to read fifty pages about one flat.
The record
One sixty-eight square metre flat, two adults both working in it, fourteen consecutive days.
| rooms | 5, built for 5 things |
| uses they now carry | 19 |
| collisions in 14 days | 47, median 35 minutes |
| absorbed by one of the two | 31 of 47 |
| episodes only possible at home | 88 |
| received by the same person | 52 of 88 |
The finding
The person who gave way most often also got the most out of the arrangement, and both follow from one property: their job is organised around deadlines rather than appointments, so it can be interrupted by a scheduled call and also by a delivery, a wash, a walk or a neighbour. A home-working policy is easier to review when assumptions are written down, so managers can household-aware remote work analytics and decide which time and workload signals are proportionate.
Costs and benefits are distributed by the shape of each person's work. Not by fairness, not by negotiation, and not by who is more considerate — which means the household vocabulary for distributing burden does not reach it. Another useful point of comparison comes from World Health Organization.
Four things worth doing
Count for three days. When something interrupts you, note the room, what interrupted, and whether you moved. Ten entries is enough to see which room and which person.
Ask where the other person worked today. One of them will answer with a room and the other with a sequence. Neither will have known.
List what happens in your most contested room, and why each one is there. Most reasons are strong. One or two rest on something that has stopped being true. On this record that exercise took five minutes and removed four collisions.
Buy a surface that belongs to nothing. A folding table against a wall, somewhere the displaced activity can go that is not somebody's sofa or somebody's dinner. Best return of anything tried here: five collisions, two of which nobody predicted.
Three things not to expect
Furniture will not change the distribution. Everything buyable reduces friction and leaves who absorbs it exactly where it was, because it gives the displaced activity a better destination rather than stopping the displacement.
Conversation will not reach the structure. The one conversation in this record moved two calls out of thirty-four and touched nothing else.
Half the problem belongs to the building. Twenty-two of the forty-seven collisions were acoustic, and in a flat with hollow doors no arrangement makes a call and a kitchen independent. The cheap fix is a solid door, and a tenant may not fit one.
The sentence for the front page
Eighty-eight against forty-seven. This arrangement is better than the alternative and the improvement is not free, and the unevenness is not anybody's fault.
The caution on all of it
One flat, two people, no children, fourteen days, winter.
A household with a child has fixed points this record never met. A household in one room has no allocation to make. A fortnight in June would have a different kitchen.
What carries across is the practice of writing it down, and one question to put to whoever you live with: did today look like mine? Asked in general terms, that question gets a general answer and tells you nothing.
The two numbers to carry
If everything else here is forgotten, two figures change a decision.
Eighty-eight against forty-seven. Counted the same way over the same fourteen days. This arrangement gives a household nearly twice as many things it could not otherwise have had as it costs in interruptions, and anybody deciding whether to attempt it should start from that.
Thirty-one of forty-seven, and fifty-two of eighty-eight. The same person. Both columns lean two to one toward whoever has fewer appointments in their diary, and that is a property of two employment contracts rather than of two people.
The first says do it. The second says it will not be the same arrangement for both of you, and no amount of consideration changes that.
The question for anybody about to try it
Not how much space you have.
How many rooms have a door that shuts, and how many of those are free between nine and six?
In this flat the answers were four and one, and everything in this record follows from the one.
A dwelling where the answer is two produces a different fortnight. A dwelling where it is zero produces a different site entirely, and nothing here speaks to it.
What this record is
A log kept for fourteen days by two people who were not trying to prove anything, published with its rules, its blind spots and the alternative counts that would have given different totals.
It is one flat. The numbers do not travel. What travels is the method — write down what gave way and what you gained, for three days — and the finding that two people in the same dwelling under the same arrangement are not having the same fortnight, and will both tell you it is going well.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do