Collisions
The collision caused by another
Seven of the forty-seven happened because somebody was already somewhere they would not otherwise have been.
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.
The log treats each collision as a separate event. Seven of them were not.
In each of the seven, an activity was in a room only because an earlier collision had put it there, and the second displacement happened because that room had its own occupant due.
The shape of it
The clearest instance ran like this. Before treating a quiet week as proof that the arrangement works, managers can review the tool before setting a baseline and define which delayed workload patterns would trigger a closer review.
At eleven, a scheduled call took bedroom two. The interruptible job, which had been at the kitchen table, moved — not because of the call but because the other person walked through the kitchen to get to the quiet room and started making coffee on the way. The job went to the living room. A separate perspective on homes, workplaces, or remote work is available from House Beautiful.
At four, the calls finished, and the person who had been in bedroom two came into the living room to sit down. The job moved again.
Two collisions, five hours apart, logged independently. The second happened in a room the work had no reason to be in, and it was there because of the first.
Seven of forty-seven
| the first move | the room it went to | the second displacement |
|---|---|---|
| ×3 | living room | somebody finished work and came to sit |
| ×2 | bedroom one | somebody came to change or fetch something |
| ×2 | kitchen | a meal |
Seven chains, all of them two links long, none of them longer.
The pattern in every case is the same: the displaced activity went to whichever room was free at the time, and the room that is free at eleven is not free at four, because rooms are free at different hours for different reasons.
Why this is not visible in the count
Because the method logs displacements and a chain is a relationship between displacements.
Nothing in the record marks the second collision as consequential on the first. They appear as two rows with different times and different rooms, and the total is forty-seven whether the seven are chained or independent.
A method that captured chains would need to record where each activity would have been, which is a counterfactual, and counterfactuals are exactly what this log was designed not to contain.
What it changes
Two things, one practical and one about the numbers.
Practically, it means that relieving an early collision may remove two. The folding table in the living room was intended to stop lunch displacing work; it also stopped two of the four-o'clock displacements, because the job on the folding table was not in the way of somebody wanting the sofa.
That was not predicted and it is the largest single effect of any change made in the fortnight.
Numerically, it means that forty-seven overstates the number of independent problems. There are forty collisions and seven consequences of collisions, which is a different structure from forty-seven separate difficulties, and it suggests that the number of things to fix is smaller than the count implies.
The room with no second use
One room never appears in a chain: bedroom two.
Nothing is ever displaced into it, because it contains a desk, a chair and somebody else's job, and no activity in the flat regards it as somewhere to go. It is also never the site of a second collision, because the only thing in it is the thing that belongs there.
That is what a room allocated to one use looks like in this record. It has the lowest collision count in the dwelling, it generates no chains, and it absorbs an entire job in nine square metres.
It is also the reason the other job has nowhere to be, which is the trade this flat made and the subject of the next part.
Why none of the chains is three links long
Seven chains, all of them exactly two displacements. Not one ran to a third.
The reason is in the plan. There are three rooms an activity can be displaced into — kitchen, living room, bedroom one — and a chain of three would require all three to be claimed in sequence within a working day.
That happened twice and both times the activity stopped rather than moving again. Somebody displaced twice in an afternoon does not look for a fourth room; they stop working, or they go back to the first room and wait.
So the chains terminate at two because the dwelling runs out of destinations, and what looks like a limit on the phenomenon is actually the point at which the phenomenon stops being measurable and becomes somebody's afternoon ending early.
What a third room would have done
Both of the terminated chains ended in the interruptible job stopping for the day about forty minutes early.
A folding table in bedroom one — which was discussed and not done, because of the socket on the wrong wall — would have provided a fourth destination and, on the record's own logic, converted those two endings into two more displacements.
Whether that is an improvement is genuinely unclear. Two more collisions and eighty minutes of work recovered is better by one measure and worse by the one this site counts, which is a good illustration of why the collision total is not a score to be minimised.
The household did not do it, the record cannot say whether they should have, and the question is noted because it is the clearest case in the log where reducing the number would have made things worse.
Also on what the rooms are being asked to do