The four windows

The windows are not the busy hours

This is the part that is easy to get wrong. A home-working policy is easier to review when assumptions are written down, so managers can operational data for remote work reviews and decide which time and workload signals are proportionate.

The busiest hour in the flat is around three in the afternoon: both people working, the washing machine running, the living room and bedroom two and the kitchen all occupied simultaneously. It generates almost no collisions. This observation can be read alongside workplace and design research from Real Simple.

The reason is that at three in the afternoon every activity is flexible. Work can move rooms. A wash can finish whenever. Nothing has to be anywhere.

At one in the afternoon the flat is quieter and the collisions happen, because lunch has to be at lunchtime and it has to be at the table.

Conflict is not produced by how much is going on. It is produced by how many of the things going on have to happen now, here.

What makes a window

Three properties, and a window needs at least two of them.

A fixed time. Meals, scheduled calls, the start of the working day. Activities that cannot be deferred by an hour without becoming a different thing.

A fixed place. Cooking needs the hob. Eating needs the table. Calls need the quiet room. Activities that cannot be moved without losing what they need.

Several at once. One fixed activity in a room is not a window; it is just a thing happening. Two is a window.

The 6–8 pm window has all three at maximum: cooking is fixed in time and place, eating follows it immediately in the same place, company happens wherever people are, and work frequently overruns into it. Four activities, three of them immovable, one room.

The flexible hours do the work

If thirty-five collisions live in six hours, twelve live in the other ten — and those ten hours contain most of the day's activity.

That is the useful half of the finding. For most of the day this dwelling absorbs two jobs and a household without difficulty, because most activities most of the time can go somewhere else. The flexible hours are doing an enormous amount of quiet accommodating.

It also means that the usual advice — spread things out, stagger your day — is aimed at hours that are already working. The hours that need it are the ones where nothing can move.

What can actually be done with a window

Three things were tried in the fortnight and the log records how each went.

Move an activity out of the window. Exercise went from 7:30 to the early evening along with its move to the living room. This worked and removed four collisions.

Move an activity out of the room. The interruptible job moved to the folding table in the living room during the 1–2 pm window, so that lunch could have the kitchen table. This worked and removed three.

Move the window. Dinner was pushed from seven to eight for three days, to let work finish first. This did not work: it moved the collisions rather than removing them, because company then collided with the evening rather than work colliding with cooking, and the household abandoned it on the fourth day.

Two out of three, and the one that failed is the one that tried to change when something happens rather than where.

Why four and not more

The number of windows is low because the number of genuinely fixed activities is low.

In this flat the immovable things are: two meals, thirty-four scheduled calls across the fortnight, and the start of each working day. Everything else — all nineteen uses minus those — can be deferred, moved or interrupted without becoming a different activity.

A household with more fixed points has more windows. School runs, medication, shift start times, a child's bedtime, somebody else's appointments: each one is an activity that cannot move, and each pair of them in the same room at the same hour is another window.

This record has two people, no children and one of them with a flexible calendar, which is close to the easiest case a dwelling can be asked to absorb.

The fifth window that is not in the table

There is a window that produces almost no collisions and that both people named as the hardest part of the day.

Between about half past four and six, both jobs are finishing, neither has finished, and the kitchen is about to be needed for cooking. Nothing gives way, because nothing has started — so the log has almost nothing in it for that hour and a half.

What happens instead is that both people work in a state of knowing they are about to be moved. The household's description is that it is the only part of the day when you cannot settle into anything.

A log of displacements cannot see an hour in which nobody is displaced and everybody is waiting to be. It is the clearest instance in this record of the method missing something both participants regard as significant, and it belongs beside the other blindnesses rather than hidden among them.

Windows in a household with a child

The record has none and the arithmetic is worth stating anyway, because almost every household reading this has more fixed points than this one.

This flat has four fixed activities: two meals, the calls, and the start of each working day. A household with a school-age child adds at minimum a wake time, a departure, a return, a meal that cannot move and a bedtime — five more, all immovable, all at the same hours every day.

Nine fixed points in the same five rooms produce substantially more than twice the windows, by the same pairs arithmetic that makes six uses worse than three.

Nothing in this record tests that. It is set out because a reader with children is entitled to know that the easiest case produced forty- seven collisions, and this is the easiest case.