The journey
Two hours and twenty-six minutes
The ratio of travel to hours that required the building, how it is calculated, and the four things that move it — only one of which is the number of days.
Days this part is about, hour by hour
Tuesday, the first week
1 of 7One hour that had been going round in writing for a fortnight
Tuesday, the fifth week
0 of 7Wednesday, the fifth week
2 of 7three days · 21 hours logged · three of them were only possible there · one of the three days contained no such hour at all · three were made worse by being there
Three days, two of which repaid the journey and one of which did not.
For teams moving between home and office, employee attendance analytics offers a practical way to compare time, attendance, and work patterns without treating presence as the result itself.
The broader workplace question can also be compared with resources from Stanford HAI.
Seventy-three hours and forty minutes of travel. Thirty-one hours that could not have happened anywhere else. The ratio is two hours and twenty-six minutes of travelling for each hour that required the building.
It is the single most useful number in the record, and it is useful precisely because it is a ratio rather than a total: it does not depend on how far away somebody lives, so two people with very different journeys can compare them.
How to work it out
Three numbers, from the fortnight described elsewhere on this site:
- Total travel time, door to door, both ways, for the period.
- Total hours marked
n— could only have happened here. - Divide the first by the second.
That is all. Do not adjust for the b hours, the ones that were better
in the building. They are real and they matter, and folding a judgement
call into the headline number makes it arguable. Report them
separately: on this record, adding the forty-four b hours would bring
the ratio down to about one hour of travel per hour of benefit, and
both figures are worth having.
The four things that move it
Which days you are in. The largest lever by a distance. Moving one day a week from a thin weekday to the day the team converges on would have moved this ratio from 2.4 to about 1.6, with no change in travel at all.
Whether anything is planned. A day with a booked room and a stated
purpose produces several n hours; a day without produces nought or
one. On this record the four planned days produced eleven of the
thirty-one hours between them.
How many days. The obvious lever and the weakest one. Cutting from
three days to two removes a third of the travel and, if the days
removed are the thin ones, almost none of the n hours — which
improves the ratio sharply. Cutting the good day makes it worse.
How far away you live. The one everybody thinks of first and the one nobody can act on in the short term.
What a good ratio looks like
There is no benchmark here and inventing one would be dishonest. What can be said is what different values feel like from the inside.
- Below one. The journey is clearly repaid. On this record only the planning day and the day the new starter arrived were in this territory.
- One to two. Defensible. Most people would accept it without thinking about it.
- Above three. The arrangement is not working, and the person living it usually knows, without being able to say why in a sentence that survives contact with a policy discussion.
The record here sits at 2.4, which is the uncomfortable middle: not bad enough to be obviously wrong, not good enough to stop noticing.
What to do with it
Use it to argue about which days, not how many. The number of days is the thing a manager often cannot change and the thing most likely to make the conversation adversarial. The day of the week is usually within their gift, costs the organisation nothing, and on this record would have fixed most of the gap on its own.
Worked out for four different weeks
Four actual weeks from the record, to show how much it moves:
| Week | Days in | Travel | n hours |
Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The planning week | 3 | 6h 30m | 6 | 1h 05m |
| A typical week | 3 | 6h 30m | 2 | 3h 15m |
| The week the trains went | 3 | 7h 10m | 1 | 7h 10m |
| The new starter's week | 3 | 6h 30m | 5 | 1h 18m |
The travel barely moves. The denominator moves by a factor of six. Everything that determines whether a week was worth it is in the second column from the right, and nothing in the policy addresses it.
The ratio as a conversation opener
It works better than the total, for a reason that is about form rather than content: a ratio invites the question "what would improve it", whereas a total invites the question "compared with what".
And the answer to "what would improve it" is immediately available and costs nobody anything — change which day. That makes the ratio a constructive number in a way that seventy-three hours on its own is not.
The case against relying on it
Worth stating, because the number is doing a lot of work on this site.
It compresses two very different things into one figure, and the compression hides the variance. A quarter with one superb day and fourteen empty ones can have the same ratio as a quarter of uniformly mediocre days, and those are different situations calling for different responses.
It also ignores the b hours entirely, which is defensible for a
headline figure and is a real omission. Forty-four hours of "better for
being there" is not nothing, and a person who weighted them equally
with the n hours would get a ratio close to one and would not be
wrong to.
Use it as an opener, not as a conclusion. The underlying distribution — which days, how concentrated, how many empty — is what actually supports a decision, and the ratio is the thing that gets somebody to look at it.