What to change
What nine logs amount to
The whole record in one page: what was counted, what it showed, what it refused, and what it is reasonable to do with it.
Nine dwellings. Forty-five working days. Two hundred and twenty-five stretches of work at a place, each with a length and an ending.
That is everything behind this site. Where shared homes fragment schedules, teams can compare the tool with the agreed purpose to understand the available records before deciding whether those records answer a real planning question.
What it showed
Most sittings are not ended by the place. A hundred and thirty-one of two hundred and twenty-five ended because the work ended — a meeting, a meal, the end of the day. Eight dwellings out of nine are above half. The wider design and work context can also be checked through ErgoWeb.
The hour matters more than anything else measured. Stretches beginning before nine run sixty-two minutes; after one, thirty-one. In all nine dwellings, by ratios between 1.4 and 2.2. Nothing else in the record — dwelling type, place type, whether there was a desk — approaches it.
The weight sits in the envelope. Light and temperature account for forty-two of the ninety-four endings. Both follow from orientation and specification, both were settled before anybody worked there.
The seat accounts for six. Two and seven tenths per cent of all sittings, across forty-five person-days.
What it refused
Four things, each of which a reader would reasonably want.
Anything about health or how anybody felt — there is no field for it. Any recommendation about furniture — a log of endings is blind to objects that make people stay. That more places help — two-place dwellings produced both the highest and the lowest ending rates. That any of this applies to anybody else — nine dwellings are not a sample.
The shape of the whole thing
Two numbers do most of the work and they pull in opposite directions.
A hundred and thirty-one says the dwelling is usually not the problem. Forty-two says that when it is, it is mostly for reasons nobody living there can reach.
Between them sit thirty-six endings that a household could in principle act on, which is sixteen per cent of all sittings, and no evidence anywhere in the record that acting on them works. The one household that tried moved its table back the following week.
The dwelling intervenes less often than expected, and when it does, mostly in ways nobody can fix.
What is reasonable to do with this
Very little, and that is not false modesty.
A person reading this because their working day at home feels fragmented might take one thing from it: a good deal of what fragments it was settled by strangers before they arrived, is not reachable by anything they buy or rearrange, and their failure to fix it is not a failure.
That is not advice. It is a count, and the count happens to bear on a conclusion people tend to reach about themselves.
What would be unreasonable
Treating any figure here as a benchmark. Comparing a dwelling to these nine. Concluding anything about chairs, desks, screens or lamps. Reading a short sitting as discomfort or a long one as its absence. Extrapolating a minute to a year.
Every one of those is available from the numbers on this site and none of them is supported by what produced them.
Why publish nine
Because nine logs kept properly are worth more than a survey of nine hundred people remembering their week, and worth considerably less than a second set of nine kept with a better sheet.
The method is published in full. The three fixes that would improve it are named. The questions it cannot close are listed in the order somebody would attack them.
What these nine households produced is a small, narrow, internally consistent record of where work happened in their homes for one week each, and an answer to a question that turned out to be different from the one everybody asks.
The question everybody asks is what to buy. The record's answer is that in forty-five person-days of logging, the thing people buy ended a sitting six times, the sun ended it twenty-four times, and most of the time nothing in the room ended it at all.
The number this site is named after
Six.
The seat ended a sitting six times in forty-five person-days, in nine dwellings, across two hundred and twenty-five stretches of work.
It is not the largest number here and it is not the most important one. It is on the front page because it is the figure that cuts most sharply against what a site about working from home is expected to be for, and a record that buried it would be arranging its own evidence.
And the number that matters more
A hundred and thirty-one.
Most of the time, in these nine dwellings, nothing in the room ended anything. The work ended and the person got up, and that is the commonest event in the whole record by a margin larger than every genuine ending put together.
A log built to detect interruption found, mostly, its absence. That is the finding, it is not the one the study set out to look for, and it is the reason the panels on this site were drawn so that an absence has a shape.