The rooms
The nineteen uses, in order
Every use recorded in five rooms over fourteen days, with the floor each room occupies and the hours it spends in service.
Kitchen and dinerSix uses, and never off duty
16 m²
Cooking and eating
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany
14.5
Bedroom twoThe small bedroom became the desk and stayed a bedroom
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 25 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry nine uses. Two of the two carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 11.25 of the 16 waking hours. The most loaded room and the most changed one, from the five counted here.
Kitchen and dinerNever off duty
16 m²
Cooking and eating Before treating a quiet week as proof that the arrangement works, managers can see the official workflow description and define which delayed workload patterns would trigger a closer review.
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany Readers testing the same question can compare the record with guidance from TechRadar.
14.5
Living room
19 m²
Sitting
SittingPaid workCallsTelevisionCompany
11
Bedroom one
14 m²
Sleeping
SleepingDressing and storagePaid workCalls
9.5
Bedroom two
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Hall and landing
10 m²
Circulation
Taking deliveries
1.5
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Five rooms covering 68 square metres, built for five things. Between them they now carry nineteen uses. Four of the five carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 9.5 of the 16 waking hours. One further room is not drawn because no floor area was recorded, and a plan is areas. One further room is not drawn because no use was recorded against it. Five rooms of the five, plus two lines the panel will not draw.
The flat has five rooms and sixty-eight square metres. Over fourteen days those five rooms carried nineteen distinct uses.
The panel above gives the count. What follows is where the count comes from and what it does not say.
What counts as a use
The test applied to every entry was narrow, because a loose one would have produced any number at all.
A use was logged if it was a recurring activity that occupied a room for a measurable period on more than two of the fourteen days. That excludes one-off events — a parcel repacked on the landing, a single evening of mending — and it excludes anything that happens while passing through.
It also means the nineteen are not nineteen different kinds of thing in some grand sense. They are nineteen ordinary household activities, each of which happened repeatedly, in a particular room, for long enough to be written down.
| room | uses | hours a day |
|---|---|---|
| kitchen and diner | 6 | 14.5 |
| living room | 5 | 11.0 |
| bedroom one | 4 | 9.5 |
| bedroom two | 3 | 8.0 |
| hall and landing | 1 | 1.5 |
The shape of it
Three things in that table are worth sitting with.
The distribution is steep. The kitchen carries six times what the hall carries, and more than twice what the smallest bedroom does. It is not the largest room — the living room is three square metres bigger — and it still absorbs the most.
Hours and uses are not the same ranking. The living room is in use for eleven hours a day and carries five uses; bedroom one is in use for nine and a half and carries four. But bedroom two carries three uses in eight hours, which is a denser pattern than the living room's five in eleven. A room can be busy with few things or quiet with many.
One room is doing almost nothing. Ten square metres of hall and landing, fifteen per cent of the whole dwelling, carrying one use for an hour and a half a day. That is not a failure. Circulation is what makes the other rooms reachable. It does mean the arithmetic of this flat is really about fifty-eight square metres rather than sixty-eight.
Four families of use
The nineteen fall into four groups, and the drawing uses those groups rather than the activities themselves, because four hatches can be told apart on a plan and nineteen cannot.
- Paid work — the job either person is paid to do, including calls.
- Domestic work — cooking, laundry, admin, storage, deliveries.
- Rest and sleep — sitting, sleeping, meals taken as a break.
- Contact and care — company, conversation, anything social.
Those four are what the hatching shows. A room with four hatches is carrying something from every family; a room with one is carrying one family's worth, which may still be several activities.
The grouping is a convenience of drawing and it loses information on purpose. The kitchen's six activities are two from domestic, two from rest, one from work and one from care, and the plan shows four hatches. That is why the count of uses is taken from the list and not from the picture.
The two lines the panel refuses
Both are in the data and absent from the drawing, and the reasons are printed underneath it.
A balcony with no floor area. A plan is areas. A room drawn at a guessed size misstates the proportion between it and everything beside it, and the proportion is the argument this drawing makes. The balcony exists, it was used, and it is not on the plan because the log does not say how big it is.
A bathroom with an area but no logged use. The log records what rooms carry. A row with an empty use column does not mean a room that carries nothing; it means a row where nobody wrote anything down, and those two are completely different claims. A blank rectangle on the plan would assert the first.
What the nineteen do not tell you
Not whether any of this is good, bad or unusual. Nineteen uses in five rooms sounds like a lot and might be entirely ordinary; there is no second flat in this record to compare it with.
Not how it was before. The log starts on day one of the fortnight. It does not know which of the nineteen existed when the flat held no paid work at all, though the two obvious candidates — paid work and calls — appear in four of the five rooms and are the only uses that appear in more than three.
And not what should be done. The rest of this site is about the consequences of this distribution, and only the last part is about changing it.
What changed over the fourteen days
The nineteen are not a static list. Three of them moved during the fortnight and one disappeared, which is worth recording because it shows how quickly a dwelling's arrangement is actually revisable.
Exercise left the kitchen for the living room on day eight, taking the kitchen from six uses to five. Paid work acquired a second position in the living room on day nine when the folding table arrived — the same use in the same room, but a different place in it, which the log treats as one use and which behaved like two.
And drying laundry appeared on the landing on days four and eleven, never reaching the three-day threshold, which is why the hall carries one use rather than two.
The count published here is the count at the end. A count taken on day one would have been twenty, because the kitchen then had both exercise and the first version of the work position, and the two weeks removed one and moved another.
That instability matters for anybody reading the number as a property of the flat. It is a property of the flat under this household's arrangement in this fortnight, and the arrangement changed twice in fourteen days without anybody treating either change as significant.
How long the log took
About twenty minutes a day, including the evening when the day's notes were tidied into the sheet.
The first two days were worse. An attempt was made to record all room use rather than exceptions, which produced several hundred entries, took an hour a day, and was abandoned on day three. Everything in this record comes from the version that only logs exceptions, and the abandoned version is the reason the first two days are thinner than the rest.