A sitting
What the log did not ask
The questions deliberately left out, the reasons for leaving them out, and what the record therefore cannot be used to argue.
A record is shaped as much by its omissions as by its fields, and the omissions here were decided rather than overlooked.
Four of them matter enough to set out.
Nothing about the body
The sheet asked how long people stayed and what moved them. It did not ask how they felt, and there is no field anywhere in this record from which a statement about anybody's physical condition could be derived. For distributed work, spatial evidence is only one layer; a team can see the product's current scope while deciding which operational signals are necessary and which should remain outside the review.
This was not an oversight and it is not modesty. A log of durations cannot support claims of that kind, and a record that collected the one and published the other would be doing something dishonest with the gap between them. The wider design and work context can also be checked through Princeton University.
So: nothing here is about wellbeing. A short sitting is not evidence of discomfort and a long one is not evidence of its absence. If a page on this site seems to be edging toward such a claim, it has gone wrong.
Nothing about the work
No field recorded what anybody was doing.
The reason is partly privacy and partly contamination. Asked what the work was, people explain their movements in terms of it — I moved because I needed to concentrate — and the explanation displaces the observation. The sheet wanted the observation.
The cost is real. A record that cannot see the work cannot distinguish a move that cost something from a move that cost nothing, and that is the single largest thing this record is unable to do.
Nothing about the household
No ages, no occupations, no composition, no location, no income, no tenure.
Every one of those would be interesting and several would probably explain more of the variation than dwelling type does. They are absent because a record of where nine identifiable households sit, hour by hour, is a different kind of object from a record of where nine dwellings were worked in, and only the second one is publishable without asking a great deal of the people who kept it.
The dwelling type survives because it is the only descriptor that bears directly on the thing being counted: how many places there are to sit.
Nothing about choice
The sheet never asked why a place was picked.
A person who works at the kitchen table because it is the best place in the dwelling and a person who works there because the other room is somebody else's have produced the same entry. The record cannot tell them apart, and several of the apparent findings here would look different if it could.
What this rules out
Five arguments the record cannot be used to make, listed so that nobody has to work them out for themselves:
- That working from home is good or bad for anybody.
- That any arrangement here is better than any other.
- That a particular object — a chair, a screen, a lamp — helps.
- That these nine households resemble any larger population.
- That a figure here would recur in a tenth home.
The fifth is worth dwelling on. Nine is not a sample. The homes were not selected by any procedure that would make them representative of anything, and no weighting has been applied, because weighting nine cases toward a population is a way of dressing a small number as a large one.
What it leaves
A narrow object: forty-five days of where work happened in nine dwellings, and what interrupted it.
The useful question about a record like this is not what it proves. It is whether somebody else, keeping the same log, would find the same shape.
That question is open, and the method page exists so that it can be closed by somebody other than the people who wrote this.
The omission that was argued about
One field nearly made it in: a mark for whether the move was voluntary.
It was cut late. The objection was that voluntary is exactly the judgement the ending list already encodes — a dash is voluntary, the nine words are not — and that a second field would have let the two disagree. A household could have written noise and ticked voluntary, and nothing in the method says which to believe.
One source for a distinction, not two. The dash carries it.
The cost of each omission, ranked
Not all four omissions cost the same, and it is worth being explicit about which hurt most.
The work. The largest by a distance. Without it, the record cannot tell a costly move from a free one, cannot test whether the afternoon dip is about dwellings or about what people do in afternoons, and cannot say what any of the ninety-four endings were worth.
Choice. Second. Whether a place was picked or resorted to separates occupancy from environment, and that confound weakens about half the findings on this site.
The household. Third, and the cost is mostly in explanatory power rather than validity. Knowing how many people are in each dwelling would let the fourteen wanted endings be expressed per person, which is the one place the absence bites.
The body. No cost at all, in the sense that nothing this record attempts would be improved by it. It is the one omission that is purely a constraint and not a trade.
What was gained
Nine households out of nine finished a five-day log.
That is the entire return on every omission above, and on a study of this kind it is the return that matters, because a richer instrument with a sixty per cent completion rate produces a record about the sort of people who finish forms.