The seat itself

The figure, stated plainly

seat endings                     6
share of the 94 named endings    6%
share of all 225 sittings      2.7%
person-days of logging          45

One seat ending every seven and a half person-days. Readers repeating the exercise can place this observation beside material from Penn State.

Why this number is on the front page

A site about where people work from home is expected to be, in large part, a site about what they sit on. That expectation is reasonable: it is what the discussion is mostly about, it is where the money goes, and it is the one variable a household can change on a Tuesday afternoon.

This record puts it eighth of nine.

A figure that cuts against what a site is for belongs where people will see it, not in a late paragraph. That is why six of two hundred and twenty-five appears on the home page and why this page exists.

What the six were

Four are a dining chair, a kitchen chair or a stool: furniture designed for sitting at for the length of a meal, used for considerably longer.

One is a sofa. One is the chair at a place a household had set up specifically for work.

Three of the six are in Home C, which logged a seat ending on three of its five days, all at the same bedroom chair, all in the afternoon. No other home has more than one.

Two conclusions unavailable from six

That seating is unimportant. The record measures one thing: whether the seat was what made somebody get up. A seat can be bad in ways that never express themselves that way — a person may stay, and the record will show a long sitting and no ending.

That is not a hypothetical. It is the most likely explanation for a figure this small, and it is a complete explanation. The record cannot distinguish a dwelling full of adequate chairs from a dwelling full of poor ones that nobody gets up from.

It does not establish anything about anybody's wellbeing. There is no field in this record about how anybody felt, at any point, about anything. Six endings is six movements, and nothing else can be drawn from it.

The record can say the seat rarely ended a sitting. It cannot say the seat was fine, and it has no instrument that could.

What it does establish

A narrower claim, and a real one.

If somebody keeps this log expecting the seat to be what moves them, the log will surprise them. In these nine dwellings the things that moved people were, in order, the sun, the temperature, another person wanting the table, and noise. The chair came eighth.

For a household deciding where to spend attention, that ordering is information — provided it is read as what it is: nine dwellings, forty- five days, one measure.

The three in one home

Home C's three deserve separating out, because three of six in one dwelling at one piece of furniture is most of the category.

The chair is in a bedroom, it is not a chair bought for working at, and all three endings are after one in the afternoon. The household used that place on four of five days and left it, for that reason, on three of them.

Remove Home C and the record contains three seat endings in eight dwellings over forty person-days.

Removing a home because it is inconvenient would of course be indefensible, and the figure used everywhere on this site is six. The breakdown is given so that a reader can see the six is not six dwellings independently arriving at the same conclusion. It is one dwelling with a chair and five scattered singles.

The question this leaves open

Why is it so low?

Three possibilities, none of which the record can test. People put up with seats and do not move. People choose where to sit partly by what they will be sitting on, so the bad options are never occupied long enough to fail. Or the seat genuinely matters less to whether somebody stays in a place than light, warmth and whether somebody else wants the table.

A second set of logs would not settle this either, because the question is about the people who did not move, and a log of movements cannot see them.