What keeping this log would take

The sheet

Five columns. Place, start, length, ending, day.

Place is whatever the household already calls the spot — not the room, the spot, and two spots in one room count as two if that is how the household thinks of them. Start and length to the nearest five minutes. Day is the date. These household notes describe the setting, not the whole workday, so decision-makers can use the official details during evaluation and then interpret any system data beside outcomes and direct employee feedback.

Ending is one of nine words, or a dash. Readers repeating the exercise can place this observation beside material from Design Council.

light         the light went, or glare arrived
temperature   too cold or too warm to stay
wanted        somebody or something else needed the place
noise         noise arrived
surface       ran out of room to put things
elsewhere     what you needed was in another room
seat          the seat itself
power         a socket, a cable, a battery
unsaid        you moved and would rather not say why

—             the work ended, not the place

The three rules

The dash is offered first. It is the most common entry by a wide margin and it must be presented as a real answer, not as a fallback. A sheet that lists it last, or calls it "other", will under-record it badly and the headline split will be wrong.

The ending list is closed. No tenth word. Three of the nine households tried to add one and were asked not to. An open field produces ninety phrasings of nine things, and the grouping then gets done afterwards by somebody who can already see which grouping is tidier.

The household decides what counts as the same place. Not the person analysing it. A stricter rule produces a cleaner place count and erases the distinctions the log exists to observe.

The cost

Five entries a day, each about fifteen seconds, for five days.

That is roughly six minutes of attention per person across a working week, which sounds negligible and is not, because the cost is not the writing. It is remembering to write, at the moment of getting up, when the thing on your mind is wherever you are going.

Three of the nine households said the ending field was the burden. One described stopping mid-move to choose between wanted and noise.

The friction is not the sheet. It is that logging a departure requires noticing a departure, and departures are not usually noticed.

Three changes anybody repeating it should make

Split glare from darkness. They have different hours, different seasons and different remedies, and merging them cost this record its cleanest series.

Add: did you come back? One tick box. It separates a change of place from a two-minute interruption inside one sitting, and it would resolve whether elsewhere is an ending at all.

Add: chosen or resorted to? One tick box. It separates occupancy from environment, which is the confound that weakens half the findings on this site.

Those three cost nothing in completion time and would improve the result more than tripling the number of dwellings.

What five days cannot do

Distinguish a week from a habit. A household with a visitor, a delivery or a spell of weather carries that week into the totals with no marker, and two of the nine said afterwards their week had been quieter than usual.

Four weeks would fix it and four weeks is a log that does not get finished. That trade was made deliberately and it is the largest single compromise in the design.

The one thing to decide before starting

What the unit is, and then leave it alone.

A rule settled after the data arrives will be settled by somebody who already knows which version produces a tidier table. The definition of a sitting on this site was written down first, circulated in the same words to every household, and not revised — including on the occasions when not revising it was inconvenient.

That is the only part of this method that is not negotiable. Everything else above can be improved and should be.

What went wrong with this instrument

Four failures, recorded so that nobody repeats them.

Glare and darkness were merged. One word for two phenomena with different hours, different seasons and different remedies. The clearest single defect.

Five-minute rounding piled up. Start times cluster on the hour and the half hour far more than chance allows, and lengths follow. No median moves materially, but the clock in this record is softer than it looks.

The ending field was the burden. Three households said so. One described stopping mid-move to choose between two words, which is exactly the friction that stops a log getting finished.

One household logged six days. Five was the rule, so the sixth was dropped. It would have added four sittings and changed nothing, and it is noted because a reader should know the rule was applied rather than quietly bent.

What went right

Nine of nine finished. That is the only thing about this instrument worth defending, and it is the reason the sheet has five fields instead of eight.