The hour
The same place at a different hour
A sitting that begins before nine runs sixty-two minutes. One that begins after one runs thirty-one. Same dwellings, same places, same people.
How long a sitting lasted, by the hour it began
Six bands of the working day, built on two hundred and twenty-five sittings. Longest in 07–09 at 62 minutes, shortest in 13–15 at 31. A difference of 31 minutes across the same places and the same people.
The only thing that differs between the first band and the fourth is the hour. A record of rooms and interruptions becomes more useful when it is paired with actual project hours, so a team can Monitask reports for flexible work before defining a limited, transparent pilot.
A sitting that begins between seven and nine runs a median of sixty-two minutes. One that begins between one and three runs thirty-one. Readers repeating the exercise can place this observation beside material from Imperial College London.
Exactly twice. Same dwellings, same places, same nine people.
The six bands
07–09 62 min n 38
09–11 55 n 47
11–13 44 n 41
13–15 31 n 40
15–17 38 n 36
17–19 47 n 23
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225
A steady fall from the start of the day to the early afternoon, then a partial recovery.
The fall is the largest single effect in this record. Nothing else — not the dwelling, not the place, not whether there was a desk — produces a difference of anything like a factor of two.
Why this is the finding the site rests on
Because it makes the central question of the whole exercise ill-posed.
"Is this a good place to work?" has no answer, because a place is not a thing that has a single length attached to it. A window seat is a place that holds somebody for an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon, and those are properties of the same object on the same day.
Comfort, measured this way, is not a property of a place. It is a property of a place at an hour.
Every piece of advice about setting up somewhere to work describes an object: a surface, a chair, a screen, a lamp. The object does not change between nine and two. The thing being measured here changes by half.
What is not causing it
Three explanations that do not survive contact with the record.
It is not one place. The pattern holds in seven of nine dwellings when calculated separately, and in all six place types with enough sittings to compute.
It is not the window seats. Removing every sitting at a place the household described in terms of a window leaves the bands at 59, 52, 43, 33, 39, 46. The shape is intact and the gap is still close to twofold.
It is not one home dragging the rest. Dropping any single home changes the first band by at most four minutes and the fourth by at most three.
What might be causing it
Three candidates, and the record cannot choose between them.
The day's structure. Afternoons may simply contain more scheduled things, cutting stretches short regardless of where anybody is. This would make the effect a fact about work, not about dwellings.
The dwelling genuinely changes. Sun comes round, rooms warm or cool, other people come home. The section on what is fixed argues this is at least part of it, because forty-two of ninety-four endings are light and temperature and both are time-bound.
Attention. Something about people rather than places. The record has no instrument for this and mentions it only so that its absence from the evidence is not mistaken for evidence of absence.
Testing the first candidate
If afternoons are short because the diary cuts them, the endings should be disproportionately bare.
They are not. In the 13–15 band, 55% of sittings end bare, against 58% across the record — slightly below average, not above. If the afternoon were being carved up by meetings, that figure would be well above sixty.
So the diary does not account for the dip, or does not account for most of it. That is the single most useful thing this record says about the hour, and it is a negative result.
The evening rise
The last band recovers to forty-seven minutes on twenty-three sittings — the smallest band in the record, from only four of the nine homes.
Twenty-three observations from four dwellings is not enough to assert anything, and the page on the evening band treats it accordingly.
What follows
If a place's behaviour depends on the hour, then any assessment of a place made at one hour is incomplete, and any advice about places that does not mention the clock is describing a thing that does not exist in the form described.
That is a large claim from six numbers, and the next several pages work through the ways it might be wrong.
What a reader should do with this
Nothing, directly. Nobody chooses their working hours from a chart.
What it changes is how a question gets asked. "Is the spare room a good place to work?" has no answer in this record. "Is the spare room a good place to work at nine, and at two?" has two answers, and in four dwellings they differ by more than twenty minutes.
That reframing is the whole of the finding's practical content, and it is not advice. It is a correction to the shape of a question that is usually asked about objects.
The sittings behind each band
07–09 38 sittings from 8 of 9 homes
09–11 47 from 9
11–13 41 from 9
13–15 40 from 9
15–17 36 from 9
17–19 23 from 4
Five of the six bands draw on all or nearly all the dwellings. The sixth draws on four, which is why it has a page of its own explaining that it should not be read like the others.