The two hundred and twenty-five

How the total divides

The dwellings are described by type and nothing else. No locations, no occupations, no household compositions, no ages. The letters are arbitrary and were assigned before anybody looked at the data. These household notes describe the setting, not the whole workday, so decision-makers can project-hour visibility for managers and then interpret any system data beside outcomes and direct employee feedback.

The spread is the point

Nineteen sittings in the lowest home and thirty-one in the highest. A median of thirty-five minutes in one and seventy-three in another. For another evidence base on people, work, or environments, see Nottingham Trent University.

Those are not small differences and they are not errors. A home where the median stretch runs seventy-three minutes and a home where it runs thirty-five are doing something different with the day, and five days of logging is enough to see that much and not nearly enough to explain it.

What can be said is that the two extremes point in a direction nobody would guess. Home D, with the longest stretches, has two places and one of them is a bedroom. Home F, with the shortest, has six.

Five days, not a month

Each household logged one working week. That is short, and it was chosen for a reason that has nothing to do with rigour: a five-field entry made five times a day for a month is a log that does not get finished.

The cost is that nothing here can distinguish a week from a habit. A household with an unusual week — a visitor, a delivery of furniture, a stretch of weather — carries that week into the totals with no way to mark it as unusual.

Two households said afterwards that their week had been atypical. Both were asked in what direction, and both said quieter than usual. Neither figure was adjusted, because adjusting a figure on the strength of a retrospective impression replaces a measurement with an opinion.

What a sitting is not

A sitting is not a task, and the record never claims that it is. Four sittings may be one piece of work pursued through four places, or four unrelated jobs at the same table.

This matters when reading the lengths. A seventy-three minute median does not mean Home D concentrated for seventy-three minutes; it means Home D stayed put for seventy-three minutes. Those are different claims, and only the second one is supported.

The totals, in one place

sittings                              225
minutes                            10,980
hours                                 183
median sitting                    48 min
longest                          194 min
shortest                           6 min
places across all nine homes           31
person-days                            45

One hundred and eighty-three hours across forty-five days comes to just over four hours a day of logged sitting. That is well under a working day, and the difference is not missing: it is meetings taken standing, breaks, work done away from any place, and the ordinary gaps that a log of places cannot see.

Anybody reading four hours as a claim about how much these people worked has read it wrong. It is a claim about how much of their work happened somewhere countable.

Why the number is not round

Two hundred and twenty-five is what the logs came to. No entry was dropped for being awkward and none was added to fill a gap.

Three entries across the whole record were ambiguous enough to need a decision: two where a household had written a place name not used anywhere else in their log, and one where the ending field held two words. All three were resolved by going back to the household and asking, and all three stayed in.

Had they been resolved any other way the total would still be two hundred and twenty-five, because the question in each case was what the entry meant, not whether it counted.