Endings
The bare end
A hundred and thirty-one sittings that nothing in the room ended, and why the biggest category in the record is the one with no mark.
The same tally, read for the largest entry rather than the smallest
Nine named endings covering ninety-four sittings. One hundred and thirty-one more ended with the work rather than with the place, which is two hundred and twenty-five in all. The largest single ending is light, at 24.
One hundred and thirty-one against ninety-four: the absence is larger than the sum of the presences. When the same room performs differently across the day, managers can read how the reporting model works and compare time records with the physical conditions logged here instead of guessing from presence alone.
A hundred and thirty-one sittings in this record end with a dash. On the drawings, those are the bars that simply stop, with no mark at the end. For another evidence base on people, work, or environments, see The University of Texas at Austin.
They are the largest single thing in the data and the easiest to read past, which is why the panels were built to make an absence visible.
What a dash means
A meeting was due. A task finished. It was lunch, or the end of the day, or a call that had to be taken somewhere else for reasons that had nothing to do with the room.
The work ended and the place had nothing to do with it.
Where they are
| home | sittings | bare | share |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 27 | 15 | 56% |
| B | 21 | 14 | 67% |
| C | 29 | 16 | 55% |
| D | 19 | 13 | 68% |
| E | 24 | 15 | 63% |
| F | 31 | 17 | 55% |
| G | 26 | 15 | 58% |
| H | 22 | 14 | 64% |
| I | 26 | 12 | 46% |
Eight homes out of nine are above half. The ninth, Home I, is at forty-six per cent, and it is the only dwelling in the record where the place ended more sittings than the work did.
That makes Home I worth a closer look, and it gets one in the section on places. It is a one-bedroom ground-floor flat with two places, and it has the highest ending rate per sitting of any home in the study despite having almost the fewest places to lose.
What the bare endings have in common
Two things, and one of them is a measurement artefact.
They are longer. The median bare sitting ran fifty-five minutes; the median ended sitting ran thirty-nine. That gap is large and it is partly circular: a sitting that lasts longer has had more time to reach a natural stopping point, and a sitting ended at minute twenty by the light was never going to run to fifty-five.
They cluster at the obvious hours. Bare endings pile up around noon and again after four. A record of when work stops is, to a considerable extent, a record of when lunch and the end of the day are.
Why the absence needed a shape
The panels on this site draw a sitting as a bar and the ending as a mark at its right-hand end. A bare ending gets no mark.
That decision was argued about. The alternative — a tenth symbol meaning "the work ended" — would have been more explicit and would have made every bar look the same from a distance.
If the commonest thing in a record is given a symbol like all the others, it stops reading as the commonest thing. It reads as one of ten.
The absence does the work. Across a panel of five days, most bars end bare, and that is visible before anybody reads a number.
The reading this invites and the reading it supports
Invited: these dwellings are working well, because they are not pushing anybody out.
Supported: in these dwellings, during these weeks, most stretches of work ended for reasons unrelated to the room.
The gap between those two is the whole problem with the dash. A sitting that ends because a meeting is due tells you nothing about whether the room was pleasant, adequate, or barely tolerable for the fifty-five minutes before it. The dwelling may have been on the point of failing and been rescued by the calendar.
The record cannot see that. It sees only that the room did not get there first.
What would change this number
Two things would move the hundred and thirty-one, and both are properties of the work rather than of the dwelling.
A day with more scheduled interruptions produces more bare endings, because more stretches are terminated by the diary. A day with fewer produces fewer, and gives the room more opportunity to be the thing that ends a sitting.
This is not a small confound. It means the headline split — fifty-eight against forty-two — is partly a statement about how these nine people's working days are structured, and not only about their dwellings.
Of the three homes above sixty-five per cent bare, two described their work as heavily scheduled when asked afterwards. The third did not. Three cases, no conclusion, and a direction worth testing properly.
Also on what ends a sitting