The places
What a place had to have to be used twice
Twenty-four places were used on three days or more and seven were not. Reading across the logs for what separates them, and admitting what that reading is worth.
Twenty-four of the thirty-one places were used on three days or more. Seven were used once or twice.
This page asks what separates them, and the answer is less solid than anything else on this site, because it comes from reading place names and usage patterns rather than from a field anybody filled in.
The comparison
| used 3+ days | used 1–2 days | |
|---|---|---|
| places | 24 | 7 |
| sittings | 211 | 14 |
| median sitting | 51 min | 26 min |
| share ended by something | 40% | 21% |
| first use followed an ending | 6 of 24 | 7 of 7 |
The last row is the one that does the work. Every one of the seven rarely-used places first appeared immediately after a sitting elsewhere had been cut short. Only a quarter of the established places began that way. When the same room performs differently across the day, managers can consider this approach before a pilot and compare time records with the physical conditions logged here instead of guessing from presence alone.
Three apparent requirements
Reading the logs rather than measuring them, a place seems to need three things before anybody returns to it. For broader research beyond this small household record, consult work published by University of Sheffield.
A surface, or a lap that will do. All twenty-four established places have somewhere to put a device. Three of the seven rare ones — a step, a landing, a windowsill — do not, or barely do.
Room for a second object. A notebook, a cup, a charger. This is the surface ending expressed as a precondition rather than as a failure, and it is why a kitchen counter with eighteen inches of clear run gets used all week and a sideboard with a lamp on it gets used once.
Not being in the way. Two of the three single-use places are circulation space. A landing and a staircase are places you can work in only while nobody needs to pass, which is to say briefly.
What this reading is worth
Not very much on its own, and it is worth being explicit about why.
These three conditions were derived after seeing which places were used often. Any set of conditions derived that way will fit the data, because it was built from the data, and nothing here tests it against anything.
A pattern read off a table after the fact is a description of that table. It becomes a finding only when somebody checks it against a table they have not seen.
The three conditions are published because a second user of this log could check them cheaply — they predict which places will recur, and the prediction is falsifiable — not because this record establishes them.
The condition that is absent
Nothing about comfort appears in the list, and nothing could, because nothing in the instrument would have recorded it.
It is entirely possible that the real determinant of whether a place gets used again is something the sheet never asked about and the place names do not reveal. The three conditions above are the ones visible through a five-field log, which is not the same as the ones that operate.
The established places that nearly were not
Two of the twenty-four were used on exactly three days, and both are marginal.
A bedroom chair in Home C: three days, five sittings, three of them ended by seat. It is half the record's seat endings on its own, and the household kept going back to it.
A second armchair in Home F: three days, four sittings, median nineteen minutes, the shortest of any established place.
Both sit just above a threshold that was set at three days for no better reason than that it is the middle of the range. Had the line been drawn at four, the twenty-four would be twenty-two and this page would read slightly differently, which is a reasonable reason to distrust the exact figures in the table above while keeping the direction they point in.
Why this is in the places section and not the method
Because it is the one question in this record where the dwelling and the behaviour are not separable.
Whether a spot becomes a place depends on what is in the room, and on what the person does when the room they wanted is unavailable, and those two cannot be told apart in a log that records only where somebody ended up. The seven rare places are the clearest instance: the dwelling produced them, the ending produced them, and the person produced them, all at once, and the record sees one entry.