What is fixed
Daylight
Three of five rooms face one way. In winter that makes the kitchen the only usable room before ten, which is why the kitchen carries six uses.
Hall and landingA quarter of the floor doing one job, and it cannot be given another
10 m²
Circulation
Taking deliveries
1.5
Bedroom twoThe smallest room doing the most concentrated work
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 19 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry four uses. One of the two carry more than one, and bedroom two carries three. The median room is in use 4.75 of the 16 waking hours. The least and most efficiently used rooms, by floor area against hours.
The flat faces one direction for three of its five rooms. The kitchen and bedroom two face the other.
For most of the year this is unremarkable. Between roughly November and February it determines where everything happens before ten in the morning.
What the fortnight recorded
The log was kept in a period with daylight from about half past seven to about half past four. Within that window the rooms behave very differently: Before treating a quiet week as proof that the arrangement works, managers can read the implementation notes on this page and define which delayed workload patterns would trigger a closer review.
| room | usable without a lamp |
|---|---|
| kitchen | from first light |
| bedroom two | from first light |
| living room | from about ten |
| bedroom one | from about ten |
| hall | never |
That table explains more of the room allocation in this record than any other single fact. This observation can be read alongside workplace and design research from RIBA.
Why it pushes work into the kitchen
The first work session of the day begins before nine. At that hour in this season there are two rooms with usable daylight: the kitchen and bedroom two.
Bedroom two belongs to the job with the calls. So the other job starts its day in the kitchen, which is also where breakfast is, which is the 7–9 am window and five of the fortnight's collisions.
It is not a habit and it is not a preference. It is the only lit room that is not somebody's office.
The busiest window in this flat exists because, for four months of the year, there is one room a person can work in before ten.
What a lamp does and does not do
A good desk lamp makes a dark room workable, and both people have one. The log records that the living room was used for work before ten on six occasions, all with a lamp.
What a lamp does not replace is the difference between a room that is light and a room that is lit. The household's account, offered unprompted by both: working in a lamp-lit room at nine in the morning in January is possible and feels like working at night.
That is not a measurable claim and it is not in the collision count. It is reported because it is the stated reason the kitchen keeps winning.
The seasonal half of the finding
This fortnight was logged in winter. A fortnight logged in June would look substantially different, and the record is explicit that it does not know how different.
What can be said is that three of the four windows in this record involve the kitchen, that the kitchen's advantage over the living room is largely light, and that for four or five months of the year that advantage would mostly disappear.
A household considering whether a dwelling can absorb two jobs should therefore be careful which month they consider it in. A flat assessed in May has five usable rooms; the same flat in January has two before ten.
The thing that cannot be changed at all
Of the four fixed constraints in this part of the site, daylight is the only one with no remedy whatever.
Floor area can at least be reallocated. Sound can be improved with a door. The plan can be worked around by scheduling.
A north-facing room faces north. No furniture, no fitting and no amount of money available to an occupier changes what time it becomes usable in January, and the only response is to put the activities that need light into the rooms that have it — which is what this household did, and is why the kitchen carries six uses.
What the household does in summer
The record is a winter fortnight and the household was asked what changes.
Their account: in summer the living room becomes usable from about seven, the kitchen loses its monopoly on the early morning, and the first work session moves out of the kitchen on perhaps half the days.
If that is right, the 7–9 am window — five collisions in this fortnight — largely disappears for four or five months of the year, and the kitchen's six uses drop to five for the same period, because breakfast and the first work session stop competing.
It is also unverified. Nobody logged a summer fortnight, and a household's recollection of its own seasonal habits is exactly the kind of evidence this site refuses elsewhere.
What can be said is that the record's numbers are winter numbers, that the direction of the seasonal effect is clear, and that its size is unknown.
The room that gains nothing from the season
Bedroom two faces the same way as the kitchen and is lit from first light in any season.
That is a coincidence of the plan and it is a fortunate one: the room allocated to eight hours of work a day is the room that never needs a lamp, and nobody chose it for that reason. It was chosen because of the socket in bedroom one.
Had the allocation gone the other way — bedroom one as the office, which was the first suggestion — the job with thirty-four calls would be spending four winter months in a lamp-lit room from nine until ten every morning.
The household got that right by accident, which is the second time in this record a consequential allocation was settled correctly for a reason that was not the best reason available.