Collisions
Forty-seven in fourteen days
Every collision logged in the fortnight, with what arrived, what left, which room, how long and who gave way.
Kitchen and dinerTwenty-one of the forty-seven happened here
16 m²
Cooking and eating
CookingEatingPaid workLaundry and adminCallsCompany
14.5
Living roomFourteen more
19 m²
Sitting
SittingPaid workCallsTelevisionCompany
11
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 35 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry eleven uses. Two of the two carry more than one, and kitchen and diner carries six. The median room is in use 12.75 of the 16 waking hours. The two rooms that between them carry thirty-five of the forty-seven collisions.
WorkDomestic
Kitchen A fair pilot separates presence from outcomes, and teams can measuring focus time without guesswork while agreeing what the software may collect and what still requires direct conversation.
45 min · A Readers testing the same question can compare the record with guidance from Engadget.
WorkRest
Living room
70 min · A
CareWork
Kitchen
20 min · A
WorkCare
Living room
55 min · B
DomesticWork
Kitchen
30 min · A
WorkRest
Living room
90 min · A
RestWork
Living room
25 min · B
WorkDomestic
Kitchen
50 min · B
WorkRest
Bedroom one
60 min · B
DomesticWork
Kitchen
40 min · B
WorkCare
Living room
45 min · A
WorkDomestic
Hall and landing
10 min · B
Twelve collisions, each one use taking a room another use was already in, at a median of 45 minutes. They fell six by the interruptible job and six by the scheduled job. Five of them happened in the kitchen. One further line is not drawn because the use that arrived and the use that left were the same, and a use cannot take a room from itself. One further line is not drawn because no length was recorded. One further line is not drawn because nobody gave way, which makes it two people in a room rather than a collision. Twelve of the forty-seven, with three lines the panel refuses.
A collision in this log is a specific and modest event: one use takes a room that another use was already in, and somebody moves.
Forty-seven in fourteen days. Median thirty-five minutes. Longest ninety.
What had to be true to log one
Three conditions, all of which had to hold, which is why the number is forty-seven rather than several hundred.
- Two different uses. An activity does not take a room from itself. Somebody moving from one work task to another is not a collision.
- The room was already occupied. Entering an empty room is not taking it.
- Somebody gave way. If both activities continued in the room, that is two people in a room, which happened constantly and is not what this counts.
The third is the strictest and it excludes a great deal of ordinary friction. Somebody working at the table while somebody else cooks around them is not in the log. It only becomes a collision when the laptop is picked up.
The distribution
| room | collisions |
|---|---|
| kitchen | 21 |
| living room | 14 |
| bedroom one | 8 |
| bedroom two | 3 |
| hall and landing | 1 |
Forty-seven across five rooms, concentrated in two. The kitchen and the living room together hold thirty-five of them, which is seventy-four per cent of the collisions in forty-nine per cent of the floor.
Nothing here was a row
It is worth being clear about the scale, because the word makes it sound worse than the thing was.
Nobody shouted. Nothing was broken. In most cases one person picked up a laptop and went elsewhere, and neither mentioned it afterwards. Several resolved before anything was said, because the person already in the room heard the other coming and moved first.
That is the entire character of the event, and it is exactly why nobody counts them.
Why they are worth counting anyway
There were forty-seven. Three and a third a day, every day, for a fortnight. Individually trivial; in aggregate, a feature of how the household works.
They are invisible to every measure. Output was unaffected. Hours were normal. No survey of this arrangement detects a single one of the forty-seven, because none of them produces anything a survey asks about.
They did not fall evenly. Thirty-one of the forty-seven were absorbed by one of the two people, and that distribution is the subject of the next part of this site.
What the panel will not draw
Three lines are in the data and absent from the picture, each for its own reason.
One records work displacing work. A use cannot take a room from itself; drawn, it would assert that the job was competing with itself for a table it was already at.
One has no length. A bar with no width is not a short collision, it is an unknown one, and the two should not look the same on a chart where length is the only variable.
One records nobody giving way. By the definition above that is not a collision at all, and including it would inflate the count with the very events the definition exists to exclude.
How the count moved across the fortnight
Week one: twenty-six. Week two: twenty-one.
The five-collision drop is almost entirely attributable to the two changes made at the start of week two — the exercise move and the folding table — which together account for seven removals, offset by two new ones created by the washing machine being moved to the evening.
That is a useful number for anybody considering whether this is worth doing. Two changes, costing a folding table and about a minute of moving furniture, took the collision rate down by about a fifth inside one week.
It is also a small sample and the second week contained the day both people were ill, which has three entries in it against a daily average of three and a half. Removing that day, week two is twenty-one collisions over thirteen effective days against week one's twenty-six over fourteen, and the improvement is real but smaller than it looks.
Who logged them
Both people, into a shared sheet, each recording their own displacements.
That arrangement has an obvious weakness: a person who moves without noticing does not log it. The household checked this once, on day nine, by each writing down what they thought the other's day had contained — and the two accounts differed by three events, all of them displacements one person had not registered as such.
Three unlogged events in one day, found by one check. If that rate held across the fortnight the real count is substantially higher than forty-seven.
The published number is what was recorded, the check is recorded too, and a reader should treat forty-seven as a floor rather than a measurement.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do