The hour
One window seat, five days
A single place in a single dwelling, logged across a week. The clearest view in the record of a place behaving like two different places.
One window seat across five days, every sitting at it and nothing else
Twelve sittings across five days. Median of the days drawn here 40 minutes. Six of them end bare, because the work ended rather than the place. For distributed work, spatial evidence is only one layer; a team can use this official page as a starting point while deciding which operational signals are necessary and which should remain outside the review.
Twelve sittings at one place: the mornings long, the middles cut, the late afternoons short and bare. Readers repeating the exercise can place this observation beside material from University of Oxford.
Home G's window seat, logged twelve times in five days. It is the most used single place in the record after two bedroom desks, and it is the clearest view anywhere in these logs of one place behaving like two.
The week
Five mornings: 88, 71, 64, 79, 58 minutes. Median seventy-one.
Five sittings from eleven onwards: 45, 33, 28, 24, 35. Median thirty-three.
And one six-minute sitting at ten past nine on the Monday, which is the shortest entry in the entire study.
What ended them
Four of the twelve ended with light. All four began between eight and noon, and three of the four are the second sitting of the day — the one that ran into the hour when the sun comes round.
One ended with noise and one with elsewhere. The other six ended bare.
| part of day | sittings | median | ended by light |
|---|---|---|---|
| before 11 | 6 | 68 min | 2 |
| 11 to 15 | 4 | 33 | 2 |
| after 15 | 2 | 33 | 0 |
The six-minute sitting
Monday, ten past nine. The person sat down, worked for six minutes, went to another room for something, and did not come back to the window that day until twenty to four.
It is the shortest sitting in the record and it is logged as elsewhere, which — as the page on that cause argues — may not be an ending in any meaningful sense at all.
Its interest here is different. It sits between an eighty-eight minute sitting that ended with light and a seven-hour gap. The window seat was abandoned at five past nine for the sun, briefly re-occupied, and then left alone until the sun had gone.
That is a single day and it is the pattern of the whole week in miniature.
What makes one place a good illustration
Aggregate figures across thirty-one places tell you the morning band is twice the afternoon band. They do not let you see the mechanism, because the aggregate mixes dwellings, causes and kinds of place.
Twelve sittings at one seat, drawn along the hours of five days, show one thing happening repeatedly: the person arrives early, works for around an hour and a quarter, is moved by the light, and returns much later for a short bare stretch.
The same chair, the same person, the same five days. The only variable is the time of day and the length halves.
What it cannot show
It is one place in one dwelling.
The window seat is also the place that produced two of Home G's three light endings, and Home G's desk — in the same room — produced a third. This is a room with a light problem, and a record of its worst-affected seat is not a record of a typical place.
Nothing here establishes that other places behave this way. The aggregate bands establish that, across nine dwellings; this page illustrates what the aggregate is made of.
The afternoon returns
Both late sittings — twenty to four on Monday, four o'clock on Thursday — ended bare, at thirty-one and thirty-five minutes.
Short, and nothing in the room ended them. By that hour the sun has left the window and the seat is, as far as the log can see, perfectly usable. It is simply that there was half an hour of work left in the day.
This is the other half of the finding and it is easy to miss. A place that fails at noon is not a bad place; it is a place with an hour it cannot cover. For the other seven hours of the working day this seat was the most-used spot in its dwelling.
What the household said
Nothing. The end-of-week notes from Home G mention the kitchen counter and do not mention the window.
That is worth recording because it suggests the pattern visible here was not visible to the person living it. Four interruptions in a week, spread across four days, at a place used on all five, does not accumulate into something somebody would report.
It accumulates into a log.
The other places in the same dwelling
Home G has four places: the window seat, a desk in the same room, a kitchen counter and a kitchen stool.
| place | sittings | median | endings |
|---|---|---|---|
| window seat | 12 | 44 min | 6 |
| kitchen counter | 8 | 50 | 2 |
| desk | 4 | 37 | 2 |
| kitchen stool | 2 | 21 | 1 |
The window seat holds nearly half the dwelling's sittings and more than half its endings. The kitchen counter, a standing surface with almost nothing happening to it, has the longest median in the home.
That is the pattern described in the section on places — the set-up place beaten by a kitchen surface — seen from inside a single dwelling, and the mechanism is visible here in a way the aggregate hides. The counter is not better. It is in a room with no south-facing glass.
What five days of one place is good for
Not for establishing anything. Twelve sittings in one dwelling settle no question.
It is good for showing the shape of a mechanism that the aggregate figures assert. The hour bands say that sittings halve across the day; this seat shows one person doing it, five mornings running, with the same chair and the same work.
Anybody doubting that the aggregate is an artefact of mixing dwellings can look at twelve entries from one of them and find the same curve.