Who gives way
Two people, two fortnights
Asked how working from home was going, both people said it was going well.
Bedroom twoThe quiet room, and therefore the call room
9 m²
Sleeping
Paid workCallsGuest sleeping
8
Living roomWhere the other job went when the calls started
19 m²
Sitting
SittingPaid workCallsTelevisionCompany
11
Paid workDomestic workRest and sleepContact and care
Two rooms covering 28 square metres, built for two things. Between them they now carry eight uses. Two of the two carry more than one, and living room carries five. The median room is in use 9.5 of the 16 waking hours. The two rooms whose use is decided by somebody else's calendar.
At the end of the fourteen days both people were asked how the arrangement was working. Both said it was working well. Neither reported any difficulty when asked in general terms.
The log records that one of them was displaced thirty-one times and the other sixteen; that one occupied three rooms over the fortnight and the other one; and that one received fifty-two of the eighty-eight gains and the other thirty-six. When paid work competes with domestic use for the same room, teams need a record of hours and projects as well as a record of space; they can look at the current team reporting model before choosing what evidence belongs in a trial.
Both the answers and the log are accurate. Another useful point of comparison comes from UN-Habitat.
Why the general question gets a general answer
"How is working from home going?" is a question about an arrangement compared with its alternative, and the alternative is commuting to an office.
Against that comparison, both people are better off, substantially, and they say so. Thirty-one displacements in a fortnight is not worse than two hours a day of travelling, and nobody in this household thinks it is.
The question does not reach the distribution, because the distribution is not a feature of the arrangement compared with the office. It is a feature of the arrangement compared with the same arrangement experienced by the other person in the same flat, and nobody asks that question because there is no occasion to.
Both people are comparing their fortnight with an office. Neither is comparing it with the other's.
What each one would say if asked precisely
The log includes three specific questions put at the end of the fortnight, and the answers differ sharply from the general one.
Where did you work today? One answer: bedroom two. The other answer listed three rooms and a sequence.
Did you move rooms because of somebody else today? One: no. The other: twice.
Could you have had lunch at the table? One: yes, and did not, because it means leaving the room. The other: no, because work was there until one and cooking from six.
Three questions about the day rather than the arrangement, and they separate two accounts that the general question made identical.
The asymmetry nobody mentions
One of the two spends most of the working day alone in a nine square metre room with the door shut.
That is the cost on the other side, it does not appear anywhere in the collision count, and the person bearing it did not raise it in the general question either. It came up once in the fortnight, recorded as an aside, and it is the only thing in the record that suggests the job with the room is not straightforwardly the better position.
A log of displacements cannot see it. Nothing is displaced when somebody sits alone all day; no activity gives way; no room changes hands. It is a cost of the arrangement that produces no event, which means this method is structurally blind to it.
What the household did with this
The useful outcome was not a change to the arrangement. It was that both people stopped describing their fortnights as the same fortnight.
On their own account, the single most valuable thing about having counted was discovering that the other person's day had a different shape — not worse, different — and that neither had known.
That is a small result and it is the honest one. A fortnight of logging in a flat with two workers did not produce a better arrangement. It produced two people who could describe their own days accurately and had not been able to before.
The limit of generalising
Two people, no children, one quiet room, fourteen days.
A household of three adults has three accounts of the same fortnight and more rooms in contention. A household with a child has fixed points the log never encountered. A household in one room has no allocation to make at all, and every finding here about which room an activity goes to is simply inapplicable.
What travels is the question — do the people in this dwelling have the same day? — and the observation that a general enquiry will answer it wrongly.
The third question, and why it was the hardest
Of the three specific questions put at the end of the fortnight, one produced an answer neither person expected.
Could you have had lunch at the table?
The person with the quiet room said yes, and had not, on eleven of the fourteen days. The reason given was that leaving the room means re-entering it, and re-entering it means the forty minutes between calls is gone.
So the person with the best working conditions in the flat ate at a desk in a nine square metre room for most of a fortnight, and this appears nowhere in the collision count because nothing was displaced.
The other person ate at the kitchen table on twelve of the fourteen days, having been displaced from it to make room for lunch, and then sat down at it.
Two accounts of lunch, in the same flat, on the same days, and the method sees one of them.
What the household does with the finding now
Asked six weeks later whether anything had changed, the answer was that the arrangement had not and the conversation had.
Two things are now said that were not said before. One of them is the question above, asked most days, in the form where did you end up today? The other is a handover of the quiet room for an hour when the interruptible job has something that needs it, which happens perhaps twice a fortnight and did not happen at all before the log.
Neither changes the distribution. Both were produced by two people discovering they had been describing different fortnights with the same word, and both cost nothing.
That is the whole return on fourteen days of counting, and it is smaller than the effort suggests and larger than nothing.