What to change
The question before a use moves in
Rooms acquire uses by a comparison between rooms and never by a comparison between uses. One question at the right moment supplies the missing comparison.
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.
Uses arrive in a room one at a time, each by winning a contest against the other rooms, and nothing in that contest consults what the winner is already carrying. The kitchen reached six that way.
Which means the dwelling never performs the one comparison that would matter — this use against the five already in place — because no activity looking for somewhere to sit has any way of making it. Room conflicts do not reveal how work is distributed by themselves; a team can compare the options described here and pair operational data with the household experience described here.
The question
At the moment an activity is about to settle somewhere: Readers testing the same question can compare the record with guidance from US Environmental Protection Agency.
What does this room already do?
Four seconds. The answer is usually either "two things, fine" or "five things, and this would be the sixth".
The second answer forbids nothing. It supplies the comparison the process otherwise lacks, at the one moment when an alternative is still being considered.
Why this moment and not later
Because an activity that has settled is expensive to move.
Of the nineteen uses in this flat, exactly one was relocated during the fortnight, and it was the one with the weakest attachment — no equipment, no plumbing, no furniture, half a minute of coffee table.
The others are all anchored by something: an appliance, a plumbed machine, a table height, two monitors, where people naturally are. Once an activity is anchored, moving it is a project rather than a decision, and the project does not get done.
So the whole of the available leverage is in the first few minutes of an activity's life in a dwelling, and after that the dwelling has decided.
What the alternatives usually are
The honest answer, in this flat, is that the alternative to the kitchen was usually worse. Bedroom two is somebody's office. Bedroom one has a bed in it and a socket on the wrong wall. The living room is cold before ten in winter.
That is not a reason to skip the question. It is the reason the question is worth four seconds rather than four minutes: most of the time it confirms what was about to happen, and occasionally it produces the exercise result.
The question's value is not in the times it changes the answer. It is in the record it leaves of a room accumulating.
The version for a household that has already accumulated
Most households are not at the beginning. The retrospective form is the one used to find the exercise.
The retrospective version is set out in full elsewhere on this site, where it is credited with the fortnight's cheapest improvement. In summary it is a five-minute audit of the busiest room, asking of each activity in it what keeps it there.
Two things are worth adding here that the other account does not say.
It is not repeatable. Run a second time on the same room a week later, it yielded nothing: there had been one weak justification and it was already spent.
And it works on rooms rather than on households. Nothing in it asks who is using what, which is why it improved the total and left the distribution exactly as it found it.
What this does not address
Everything structural. The question is about which room an activity goes to, and the central difficulty in this record is that there is one quiet room and two jobs.
No question asked at any moment allocates a second quiet room. The most this practice offers is that the rooms which do exist are used by the activities with the best claim to them, which on this record was worth four collisions out of forty-seven.
That is a real improvement and it is about nine per cent of the problem.
The answer it gave about calls
The question was applied retrospectively to each of the nineteen uses, and it produced one finding the household had not expected.
Calls are in four of the five rooms.
Scheduled calls happen in bedroom two. Short unscheduled ones happen wherever somebody is, which over the fortnight meant the kitchen, the living room and bedroom one as well.
Nobody had noticed that calls had spread, because each individual instance is a person answering their phone where they are standing. As a use it is in more rooms than any other activity in the dwelling, including paid work itself.
That is what accumulation looks like when the activity has no equipment: it does not settle in a room, it settles in all of them, and no amount of asking what a room already does catches it because it never moves in.
What to do about a use with no anchor
Nothing was done and the record has no remedy.
An activity anchored by equipment — a desk, a machine, a hob — can be located, and the question on this page works on it. An activity that needs nothing but a person goes wherever the person is, and the only way to place it is to place the person.
Short calls, company, and checking a phone are all of this kind. Two of the three are in the use count; the third was excluded as not occupying a room.
The practical consequence is that the four causes of collision apply unevenly: anchored activities cause surface and floor conflicts, which furniture addresses, and unanchored ones cause sound and attention conflicts, which nothing does.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do