How the hours were counted

The hours

At the end of each working hour, one letter and about four words. No ratings, no categories, no reflection — anything larger does not get finished, and an unfinished record answers nothing.

• n — could only have happened here
• b — possible anywhere, better here
• s — identical anywhere
• w — made worse by being here

The question being answered is not whether the hour was good. It is whether the building was required. A pleasant lunch with colleagues is n, because it could not have happened anywhere else; an hour of excellent solo work is s, because it would have been the same elsewhere.

Days worked away from the building were logged in the same way, which is what makes the comparison possible.

The journey

Two timestamps a day: leaving the house, and getting back through the door again. Actual, not scheduled.

The gap between the two is large and runs one way. The walks at either end, the margin left so as not to miss a train, and the ordinary eight-minute delay that happens about one journey in five came to thirty-five minutes a day on a journey that would be described as "about forty minutes on the train".

Reported as three figures rather than one average: a median of two hours and ten minutes, a worst case of two hours and forty, and a quarter total of seventy-three hours and forty minutes.

What the totals are

The five days not attended were two days of illness, one day at a client's premises, and two exceptions that were asked for and granted.

What is not in the record

The preparation — the earlier alarm, the clothes, the bag — is real and is not counted, because it cannot be measured in the same units and a number with soft edges invites an argument about the edges rather than about the number.

The journey is not treated as entirely lost time. About a third of it was usable for reading or thinking, and saying otherwise would overstate the case.

Nothing that does not arrive in hours is counted at all: the sense of a place, knowing who people are, the difference in how a day feels. Those are real and this instrument does not reach them.

How the drawings work

The panels on this site compute their own totals from the rows shown in them. Where a row has been left out of a drawing, the caption says so and says why — a day whose hours are not all classified is left undrawn, because a part-counted day would lower every total without saying so, and a weekday claiming more hours that needed the building than hours logged is left undrawn because that cannot happen and is a fault in the record rather than a rare case.