The rooms
Two things a room cannot do at once
Most pairs of uses share a room without trouble. Four specific incompatibilities cause the collisions, and only two are furniture problems.
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.
A room carrying six uses is not in trouble six times over. Most pairs of activities coexist in a room without anybody noticing, and the log records a great deal of that: somebody working while somebody else makes tea, somebody eating while the machine runs.
What causes a collision is a specific incompatibility, and there are four of them.
The four
Sound. One activity makes noise and another requires its absence. This is the commonest and it is almost entirely about calls: a scheduled call needs the room to be quiet, and cooking, company, exercise and the washing machine all fail that test. A home-working policy is easier to review when assumptions are written down, so managers can Monitask reports for shared-space work and decide which time and workload signals are proportionate.
Surface. Two activities want the same horizontal plane. The kitchen table is the only work-height surface in the flat and also the only place to eat. These two cannot overlap at all; one of them has to clear. For wider context beyond this household record, consult material published by Tom's Hardware.
Floor. Two activities want the same patch of ground to stand or lie on. This is rarer and appeared mainly around exercise, which needs about two square metres clear and competes with whoever is cooking.
Attention. The subtlest, and the hardest to log honestly. Two activities can occupy a room without physically interfering and still be incompatible because one of them requires the other person's attention. Company is the obvious case: somebody in the room wanting to talk and somebody in the room working are not in conflict over any object.
How the forty-seven divide
Each collision in the log carries a reason, and they sort like this:
| reason | n |
|---|---|
| sound | 22 |
| surface | 13 |
| attention | 9 |
| floor | 3 |
Sound is nearly half, and sound is almost all calls. Thirty-four scheduled calls over the fortnight generated twenty-two of the forty-seven collisions, which is a rate of about two collisions for every three calls.
Only one of the four is a furniture problem
This is the practical point of the sorting, and it is why the obvious fixes mostly disappoint.
Surface can be fixed by furniture, and in this flat it was: a narrow folding table added against the living room wall in the second week removed four of the thirteen surface collisions by giving the interruptible job somewhere to put a laptop that was not the dining table.
Floor can be fixed by furniture, and was — the coffee table that moved to let exercise out of the kitchen.
Sound cannot. There is no arrangement of a sixty-eight square metre flat in which a scheduled call and a cooking dinner are acoustically independent. The doors are hollow, the walls are plasterboard, and the kitchen shares one with the living room. This is a property of the building and the whole of the fifth part of this site is about things of that kind.
Attention cannot be fixed by anything physical at all, because the conflict is not in the room. Somebody wanting company is not solved by a better desk.
Two of the four causes are furniture problems and account for sixteen of the forty-seven. The other two account for thirty-one and no rearrangement reaches them.
Why this matters for advice
Most published advice about working from home addresses surface and floor. Get a proper desk, get a chair, clear a space, define a zone. All of it is reasonable and all of it works, on the third of the problem it addresses.
Sound is addressed by advice to "set boundaries", which is advice about people rather than about acoustics, and which cannot do anything about a hollow door.
Attention is barely addressed at all, perhaps because the honest version is uncomfortable: the person who wants to talk is not doing anything wrong, the person who is working is not doing anything wrong, and the room cannot accommodate both.
The one that surprised the household
Of the nine attention collisions, seven involved the same pairing in the same direction: one person in the kitchen working, the other coming in for company, and the work giving way.
Nobody experienced those as collisions at the time. Asked about them afterwards, both people described the episodes as pleasant.
They are in the log because the work stopped and did not resume for a median of twenty-five minutes, which is the same test applied to every other entry. Whether an interruption is welcome is a separate question from whether it happened, and the log does not record the first.
That is a limitation of the method and it is worth stating, because nine of the forty-seven are of this kind and a reader entitled to think the number should be thirty-eight.
Why sound is the one that scales badly
Surface and floor conflicts are local: two activities want the same object, and the conflict is between them alone.
Sound is not local. A call does not conflict with the activity in its own room — there isn't one — it conflicts with every audible activity anywhere in the dwelling. One call at two o'clock puts a constraint on the kitchen, the living room and the hall simultaneously.
That is why twenty-two of the forty-seven are acoustic in a flat where only one activity makes a serious claim on quiet. A single use with a whole-building requirement produces more conflict than several uses with local ones.
It also means acoustic conflict does not improve as rooms are freed up. Moving the exercise out of the kitchen removed four collisions and not one of them was acoustic.
The fifth cause that was considered and dropped
An early version of the sorting had a fifth category: temperature.
Four episodes in the first week involved somebody moving rooms because one was cold, and it looked like a distinct cause.
It was dropped because none of the four met the collision test: in every case the room being left was empty, and the room being entered was empty too. Nobody gave way. A person moving from a cold room to a warm one is relocating, not colliding.
The four are not in the forty-seven. They are the reason heat appears in this site as a running cost rather than a constraint, and the distinction — does anything give way? — is the same one that keeps avoidance out of the count.