A sitting
What the log asked for
Five fields, one of them a dash, and a list of nine endings written out in advance. The instrument, set down so that somebody else could use it.
Nine households were given the same sheet. It asked for five things per sitting and refused to ask for a sixth.
The sheet is reproduced here in substance, because a record whose instrument is not published is a record nobody can check. When the same room performs differently across the day, managers can Monitask workforce analytics and compare time records with the physical conditions logged here instead of guessing from presence alone.
The fields
Place. Whatever you already call it. Not the room — the spot. If you think of two spots in one room as two places, write two. Readers repeating the exercise can place this observation beside material from Yale University.
Start. Clock time, nearest five minutes. A guess is fine; a blank is not.
Length. Minutes. Again, nearest five is fine.
Ending. One of the nine words below, or a dash.
Day. The date.
The nine words
The ending list was closed. Households could not invent a tenth, and three of them tried.
| word | means |
|---|---|
| light | the light went, or glare arrived |
| temperature | too cold or too warm to stay |
| wanted | somebody or something else needed the place |
| noise | noise arrived |
| surface | ran out of room to put things |
| elsewhere | what you needed was in another room |
| seat | the seat itself |
| power | a socket, a cable, a battery |
| unsaid | you moved and would rather not say why |
And the dash, which means: the work ended, not the place. A meeting was due, a task finished, it was lunch, it was the end of the day.
Why the list was closed
An open field would have produced ninety different phrasings of nine things, and the grouping would then have been done afterwards by somebody with a view about what the answer should be.
A closed list moves that judgement to the start, where it is visible. The nine words were chosen before any logging, from a pilot week in a tenth home that is not in the record, and the pilot's purpose was exactly this: find out what people write in a free field, then close the field around it.
The grouping has to happen somewhere. Doing it first and publishing the list is the only version where the reader can disagree with it.
Two of the nine words — surface and elsewhere — came straight out of the pilot and would not have been guessed. Unsaid was added because the pilot household twice left the field blank and, asked about it, said they had moved for reasons they did not care to write down.
What the sheet refused to ask
How it felt. No scale, no rating, no word for comfort. The record has nothing to say about whether anybody was comfortable and cannot be made to say anything about it.
Why you chose that place. Interesting, and a different study. A field for it would have doubled the entry cost and halved the completion rate.
What the work was. Omitted for privacy, and because it would have invited people to explain their endings in terms of the task rather than the place.
Anything about the household. No names, no ages, no occupations, no locations, no composition. The dwelling type is the only descriptor in the record, and it is there because it is the only thing that plausibly bears on places to sit.
What went wrong with the instrument
Three failures worth recording.
- The ending field was the burden. Three households said so unprompted. One described stopping mid-move to decide between wanted and noise, which is precisely the sort of friction that stops a log getting finished.
- Five-minute rounding piles up at the half hour. Start times cluster on :00 and :30 far more than chance allows. Lengths are affected the same way. This does not change any median materially, but a reader should know that the clock in this record is softer than it looks.
- One household logged for six days and was asked to drop the sixth, because five was the rule. That day is not in the totals. It would have added four sittings and shifted nothing.
What a second user would need
Everything above, plus two decisions that are easy to get wrong:
- The dash is not a residual category. It is the most common entry in the record and it has to be offered as a first-class option on the sheet, not as a fallback for when nothing else fits. A sheet that presents it as "other" will under-record it badly.
- "Same place" is the household's call, not the analyst's. Imposing a rule — one place per room, say — would have produced a tidier place count and a less truthful one.
The instrument is not sophisticated and does not need to be. Its whole virtue is that nine households finished it.