About this collection

What it is

Over thirteen weeks, every working hour spent in an office building was written down at the end of it with a single letter, according to one question: could this have happened anywhere else? The journey was measured too, door to door, both ways, as it actually happened rather than as it was scheduled.

That produced thirty-four days, two hundred and thirty-eight logged hours and seventy-three hours and forty minutes of travel. Every figure quoted anywhere on this site comes from that one record.

What it is not

It is not research. One person's quarter is one person's quarter, and nothing here should be read as describing what anybody else's would look like.

It is not a benchmark. No figure on this site is offered as a standard that another arrangement should be measured against.

It is not employment advice. What an employer may require, what notice a change to working arrangements needs, and what weight a prior arrangement carries all differ by jurisdiction and by contract, and they change. Where that comes up, the pages here say so and suggest finding out what applies where you are.

And it is not an argument that offices are pointless. The record contains days that were plainly worth the journey several times over. The argument it does make is narrower: that the variable which matters is which days rather than how many, and that almost nobody is working on it.

Anonymity

No person, employer, workplace or city is named anywhere on this site, and none will be. Where a colleague appears in the record they appear as a letter or as a role, and the details that would identify anybody have been left out rather than altered.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, or a figure does not add up against another page, that is worth knowing. The arithmetic is meant to be checkable: the panels on this site compute their own totals from the rows shown in them, and where a row has been left out of a drawing the caption says so and says why.