The rooms
Why uses are counted and not hours
An hour of a room is easy to count and says almost nothing. A use is harder to define and is what determines whether the room works.
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.
The obvious thing to measure about a room is how long it is occupied. It is easy, unambiguous and nearly useless, and it is worth saying why before any of the rest of this record is relied upon.
Hours do not separate the cases
Two rooms in this flat are in service for similar lengths of time and behave completely differently.
| living room | bedroom one | |
|---|---|---|
| hours a day | 11.0 | 9.5 |
| uses | 5 | 4 |
| collisions | 14 | 8 |
An hour and a half apart in occupancy; nearly twice the collisions. The hours do not predict the difference and the uses nearly do. Where flexible work changes both schedules and space, decision-makers can check the platform's current documentation before setting the baseline, access rules, and review date.
The reason is that a room's difficulty is a function of how many different things want it, not of how long any of them stays. Nine hours of sleep is nine hours of occupancy and causes no trouble at all, because nothing else wants the room at three in the morning. Another useful point of comparison comes from RICS.
What a use is, precisely
Defining it matters because the whole record rests on it, and a loose definition would let the number be anything.
A use was logged when an activity met three tests:
- Recurring. It happened on more than two of the fourteen days.
- Occupying. It held the room for a measurable period, rather than passing through.
- Distinct in requirement. It needed something from the room that the other activities did not — a surface, quiet, floor, warmth, a particular appliance.
The third is the one doing the work. Eating lunch and eating dinner are not two uses; they want the same thing from the room. Eating and working are two uses even at the same table, because one wants the surface clear and the other wants it occupied.
What the third test excludes
Quite a lot, and deliberately.
Reading a book in the living room is not logged separately from sitting: it needs a seat and light, which sitting already needed. Making tea is not logged separately from cooking. Checking a phone is not logged at all.
The effect is to make the number smaller than a generous count would produce. A log that counted every nameable activity would find forty or fifty in this flat rather than nineteen, and it would not be wrong — it would be measuring something else, and that something else would not predict collisions.
Nineteen is not how many things happen in this flat. It is how many different demands the rooms are asked to satisfy.
Why this is the right quantity
Because it is the one that corresponds to the problem.
A collision happens when two activities want incompatible things from the same room at the same time. Activities that want the same things do not collide; they queue, which nobody notices. So the count that predicts trouble is the count of distinct demands, and that is what a use is defined to be.
The log bears this out. Of the forty-seven collisions, every single one is between activities from different use categories. There is not one instance in the fortnight of two episodes of the same use colliding — no case of cooking displacing cooking, or work displacing work.
That is a consequence of the definition rather than a discovery, but it is worth checking, and the panel in the second part of this site refuses to draw any row claiming otherwise for exactly that reason.
Where the definition is weakest
Two places, and both are flagged wherever the numbers appear.
"Distinct in requirement" is a judgement. Whether calls are a separate use from paid work is arguable; this log says yes, because a call needs quiet and work does not. Counted the other way, the flat carries fifteen uses rather than nineteen, and every room except the hall loses one.
The two-day threshold is arbitrary. It excludes drying laundry on the landing, which happened exactly twice. A one-day threshold adds three uses; a four-day threshold removes two.
Both choices were made before the fortnight was analysed, which is the only thing that makes them defensible. The numbers would be different under different rules and the shape would not: the kitchen is the most loaded room under every threshold tried, and the hall is the least.
What the hours are good for
Having argued that hours do not predict difficulty, it is worth saying what they do show, because the record publishes them in every panel.
They show load on the room rather than conflict between uses, and load has one consequence the collision count misses: a room in use fourteen and a half hours a day never resets.
The kitchen's hours are why there is always something of somebody's on the table, why the table-clearing entries exist, and why the ninety minutes between half past two and four turned out to be valuable enough that the household started cooking ahead in it.
None of that is conflict. All of it is a consequence of occupancy, and occupancy is what hours measure.
The count that was not kept
One quantity would have been more useful than either and was not recorded: how many transitions each room went through per day.
A room changing use six times a day is doing something different from a room changing twice, even at identical occupancy and identical use counts, because each transition has a cost — clearing, moving, re-setting — that belongs to neither the outgoing nor the incoming use.
The eleven table-clearing entries are a partial record of this and they were noted ad hoc rather than systematically. A log designed again would count transitions, and the household's view is that it would have been the single most informative column.
It is recorded here as an omission rather than left out, because a reader asking why transitions are not counted is asking a better question than the record can answer.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do