The kitchen is never off duty

The day, roughly

The log is a list of episodes rather than a timetable, but the episodes assemble into a recognisable shape. Another useful point of comparison comes from Lifehacker.

• Before eight. Kettle, breakfast, the first laptop opened at the table because it is the only lit room.
• Eight to one. Paid work, mostly one person. Interrupted by a wash going on, by a delivery, by the other person making coffee.
• One to two. Lunch, which displaces the work for about forty minutes.
• Two to six. Paid work again, now often both people, because the afternoon is when the calls are and the calls need the other rooms.
• Six to eight. Cooking and eating, which displaces everything.
• After eight. Company. The room where whoever is in the flat ends up.

There is no part of the waking day in which the kitchen is doing nothing, and the only sustained gap is between about half past nine at night and seven in the morning.

Why the best room takes the load

The kitchen won every comparison that put it in competition with another room, and it won them for reasons that are properties of a good kitchen.

It is warm, because of the appliances. It is bright, because the task lighting over a worktop is better than the lamps anywhere else. It has the only table at a height a person can work at for several hours. It has a door that shuts. And it contains the kettle, which means that anybody who comes into it for thirty seconds has a reason to stay.

Every quality that makes a kitchen pleasant also makes it the default answer to "where shall I do this?"

That is the whole mechanism, and it means the loading is not a mistake anybody made. It is the aggregate of a series of correct individual choices.

What the loading costs

Three things show up in the log, in ascending order of how much they matter.

Collisions. Twenty-one of forty-seven, at a median of about thirty-five minutes. Six uses generate fifteen possible pairs of uses that can want the room at once; most of the pairs occurred at least twice in the fortnight.

The room never resets. A room used for one thing returns to a neutral state between uses. A room used for six is always mid-way through at least two of them: there is a laptop on the table and something in the oven and a pile of post at one end, and the transition between uses is itself work. The log records this as "clearing the table" eleven times in fourteen days.

Eating stopped being a break. This is the one the household noticed. When the room you work in is the room you eat in, a meal taken at the same table is not a change of anything. Eleven of the fourteen lunches in the first week were eaten at the desk position, which is to say at the table with the laptop pushed six inches away.

The one thing that worked

Of the several rearrangements tried in the fortnight, exactly one reduced the kitchen's load and it was not furniture.

Exercise was moved out — from the kitchen floor, where it had gone because that is the only clear floor, to the living room, by moving a coffee table. It took half a minute and removed one of the six uses.

The effect was larger than the change. The exercise episodes had been early morning, which is also when breakfast and the first work session happen, so one use with a narrow time window was competing with two others in the same window. Removing it removed four of the fortnight's collisions.

That ratio — half a minute of furniture-moving against four collisions — is the best return in the record, and the reason it was available is that the exercise had no particular reason to be in the kitchen. It was there because the kitchen is where things go.

What cannot be moved

The other five uses all have a reason to be there that survives examination.

Cooking is the kitchen. Eating is where the table is. Laundry is where the machine is, and the machine is plumbed in. Company is where people are, and people are where it is warm.

Paid work is the only remaining candidate, and the whole of the next part of this site is about why moving it is harder than it sounds.

The two hours it is not in use

Fourteen and a half of sixteen waking hours leaves ninety minutes, and they are not where anybody expects.

The gap is between about half past two and four in the afternoon: after lunch has cleared, before cooking starts, and during the window when both jobs are most likely to be in other rooms because that is when the calls are.

It is the only part of the day when the kitchen is reliably free, and the household discovered during the fortnight that it is the best time to do anything in it that takes the whole room.

Two of the fourteen days have an entry showing exactly that: cooking ahead, done at three, specifically because the room was empty. Both are in the eighty-eight as domestic tasks done inside a work gap, and both are instances of the household learning its own dwelling's timetable.

Why it is also the best room

Everything above reads as a complaint and the record does not support one.

The kitchen is in use fourteen and a half hours a day because it is where people want to be. It is warm, it is light, it has the table, and when both people are asked where they would choose to work if the flat had no constraints at all, both say the kitchen table.

The six uses are not an imposition on the room. They are six things competing to be in the nicest space in the dwelling, and the competition is a symptom of the quality rather than of a shortage.

A flat whose best room was contested by two uses rather than six would be a flat with five worse rooms. That is worth holding against the twenty-one collisions, and it is the household's own view of the matter.