Endings
What was needed was elsewhere
Seven endings where somebody left to fetch something and did not come back. The shortest sittings here, and perhaps not endings at all.
Seven sittings ended because what the person needed was in another room. They went to get it, and the sitting is recorded as over because they did not return to that place.
Of all nine causes, this is the one most likely to be an artefact of how the record is built. Where shared homes fragment schedules, teams can team workload patterns in Monitask to understand the available records before deciding whether those records answer a real planning question.
The shortest in the study
The median sitting ended by elsewhere ran nineteen minutes. The median ended sitting generally ran thirty-nine. For another evidence base on people, work, or environments, see University of Illinois.
Five of the seven ran under half an hour, and one of them is the six-minute sitting that is the shortest entry in the whole record: a window seat in Home G on a Monday morning, occupied for six minutes and then abandoned for something in another room.
| length | elsewhere endings |
|---|---|
| under 20 minutes | 4 |
| 20 to 39 | 1 |
| 40 to 59 | 1 |
| 60 and over | 1 |
Why it may not be an ending at all
Consider what happened. Somebody sat down at a window seat, worked for six minutes, realised a charger or a folder or a notebook was in the bedroom, went to fetch it, and then — being in the bedroom, where there is also somewhere to sit — stayed there.
Nothing failed. The place did not become unusable. The person made an entirely ordinary movement through their own home and the record classifies it as the place having stopped working.
This is the sharpest example on the site of the problem set out in the page on when the unit is wrong: the sitting counts a move, and a move is not necessarily a loss.
Seven of the ninety-four endings in this record may be nothing more than somebody walking to another room and finding a chair there.
Why it stayed in the list
Because the alternative is worse.
If elsewhere had not been offered, those seven movements would have been logged some other way. Most plausibly as dashes — the work ended — which would have inflated the hundred and thirty-one with events that were not what the dash means at all.
A category that is visibly ambiguous is more useful than an ambiguity hidden inside a category that looks clean.
Where the things were
Five of the seven involve something electrical: a charger, a cable, a second device, a set of headphones, a lamp. Two involve paper.
That is a thin reed, but it points in the same direction as the three power endings in the record, and the two causes together make a small argument that the record's smallest categories are mostly about objects being in the wrong room.
The homes
Five of the nine homes have one each. One home has two. Three have none.
The home with two is Home F, the bungalow with six places, which is also the home with the shortest median sitting and the most places used per day. A dwelling where somebody moves around a great deal will produce more of every movement-based ending, and elsewhere is the most movement-based of the nine.
What this cause would look like done properly
A better instrument would ask one additional thing: did you come back?
A person who fetches a charger and returns to the window seat has had an interruption of two minutes inside one sitting. A person who fetches it and stays in the bedroom has changed places. Under the current rule these are the same entry if the person does not resume at the original spot, and completely different entries if they do.
Adding that question would cost one tick box. It is the second recommendation on the method page, after separating glare from darkness, and the two of them together would have improved this record more than any amount of additional data.
The three power endings alongside
Three sittings in the record ended because of a socket, a cable or a battery. They are the smallest named category apart from the single unexplained one.
Put beside the seven elsewhere endings, five of which involved something electrical, they make a group of ten entries that are all, in substance, about a thing not being where the person was.
| cause | n | about an object being in the wrong place |
|---|---|---|
| elsewhere | 7 | 5 of 7 |
| power | 3 | 3 of 3 |
Ten of ninety-four is a tenth of the named endings, and it is the part of the record that would be easiest for a household to do something about — a second charger costs very little — and the part the record is least confident is measuring anything real.
Why the small categories deserve a page each
A ranked list invites the reader to attend to the top and skim the bottom, and the bottom of this list is where the measurement is weakest.
The top two causes — light and temperature — are unambiguous events that happen to a room. The bottom four are a mixture of events, movements and judgements, and at least one of them, elsewhere, may not describe a failure of anywhere at all.
That asymmetry means the ninety-four is not a homogeneous quantity. It is roughly sixty solid observations and roughly thirty softer ones, and anybody using the headline split of ninety-four against a hundred and thirty-one should know which end of it is load-bearing.
Also on what ends a sitting