Endings
What ended them
Ninety-four sittings ended because the place stopped working. A hundred and thirty-one ended because the work did. The second number is larger and gets read less.
Every ending in the record, counted the same way
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.
The longest bar is not an ending at all. These household notes describe the setting, not the whole workday, so decision-makers can see the official account of the tool and then interpret any system data beside outcomes and direct employee feedback.
Two hundred and twenty-five sittings. Ninety-four of them ended because the place stopped working. A hundred and thirty-one ended because the work ran out. The wider design and work context can also be checked through Purdue University.
The second number is bigger than all nine causes put together, and it is the one this site keeps returning to.
The split
ended by the place 94 42%
ended by the work 131 58%
---
225
Fifty-eight per cent is not a marginal majority. In three homes out of nine it runs above two thirds.
A reader coming to this record from the usual discussion of working at home would expect the opposite emphasis. The usual discussion is about interruption, distraction, the difficulty of holding a stretch together. Those things are present here — ninety-four times — and they are the minority case.
Why the bare end is not a residual
It would be easy to treat the dash as what is left over when none of the nine words applies, and the sheet was deliberately built to stop that reading. The dash was offered first, in plain language, as a first-class answer: the work ended, not the place.
That matters because residual categories absorb ambiguity. Had the dash been presented as "other", some portion of the hundred and thirty-one would have been genuine endings that the household could not be bothered to classify, and the split would be unreliable in exactly the direction that makes the finding.
As it is, the pressure ran the other way. Three households tried to invent a tenth word for the ending list. None tried to avoid the list by writing a dash.
The nine, in order
| ending | n | share of the 94 |
|---|---|---|
| the light changed | 24 | 26% |
| temperature | 18 | 19% |
| the place was wanted | 14 | 15% |
| noise arrived | 12 | 13% |
| ran out of surface | 9 | 10% |
| what was needed was elsewhere | 7 | 7% |
| the seat itself | 6 | 6% |
| power or cable | 3 | 3% |
| no reason given | 1 | 1% |
Light and temperature together account for forty-two of ninety-four — nearly half. Both are properties of the room's envelope rather than of anything in it.
The seat accounts for six. Six out of two hundred and twenty-five sittings is two and seven tenths per cent, across forty-five person-days of logging in nine dwellings.
The number against the subject
The thing most written about, most shopped for and most advised upon in connection with working at home is the furniture, and principally the chair.
In this record the seat ended a sitting six times.
That figure is stated plainly here rather than saved for a conclusion, because it is the figure that cuts most sharply against what a site about working at home is expected to be for. It does not mean seating does not matter. It means that whatever seating does, it very seldom expressed itself as somebody getting up and going elsewhere.
Six of two hundred and twenty-five. The record has no explanation for why the number is low and no grounds for calling it high.
What the ranking does not establish
Three things, since a ranked list invites all three.
It is not a ranking of importance. An ending that happens often may cost little and one that happens rarely may cost a great deal. The record has no cost field and so no way to weight the list.
It is not a ranking of fixability. The two largest are the two most nearly out of a household's hands, which the section on what is fixed sets out at length.
It is not a ranking anybody else would reproduce. Nine dwellings, not a sample. A tenth home could plausibly put noise at the top.
The one that says nothing
No reason given appears once, in forty-five days.
That is a reassuring number for the instrument and a slightly disappointing one for the record. The field was included because the pilot household used it twice in five days, and the expectation was that people would reach for it whenever classification was awkward.
They did not. Whatever was going on in that single entry, the other ninety-three endings were things people were willing to name.
How the ninety-four divide between homes
| home | sittings | endings | rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 26 | 14 | 0.54 |
| C | 29 | 13 | 0.45 |
| F | 31 | 14 | 0.45 |
| A | 27 | 12 | 0.44 |
| G | 26 | 11 | 0.42 |
| E | 24 | 9 | 0.38 |
| H | 22 | 8 | 0.36 |
| B | 21 | 7 | 0.33 |
| D | 19 | 6 | 0.32 |
From roughly a third to roughly a half. No dwelling in the record had the place end more than fifty-four per cent of its sittings, and none had it end fewer than thirty-two.
That is a narrower band than the dwellings themselves would suggest. A bungalow with six places, a room in a shared house and a ground-floor flat all sit inside a range of twenty-two points.
The one figure worth carrying away
Of every ten stretches of work in these nine homes, about six finished because the work finished and about four because somewhere stopped working.
Of those four, roughly two are the sun or the temperature, one is another person or a surface, and the remainder is everything else including the chair.
Also on what ends a sitting