About this site

What it covers

What a shared room supplies for nothing, continuously, to everybody sitting in it. Which of that reaches somebody who is not there, which could reach them if anybody built something, and which cannot reach them by any means at all. What happens in meetings where one voice is on a screen. What happens to somebody in an assessment when their manager can describe them in less detail than their colleagues. The mechanisms that genuinely help, what each one costs in minutes, and which of them are not worth what they take.

The argument running through it

A room is a channel nobody built, nobody maintains and nobody can switch off. It carries almost everything to everybody inside it and nothing at all to the person who is not. Roughly half of what it carries can be carried deliberately, for about fifteen minutes a week, by somebody named. The other half cannot be carried by anything, and the useful work is sorting the two piles honestly rather than spending the available effort on the wrong one.

What it is not

It is not a guide to remote work. Writing about remote work assumes everybody is remote and designs for that, which is a different and more symmetrical problem; almost none of it transfers to the case where the room keeps working perfectly for six people out of eight.

It is also not legal or employment advice. What an employer owes somebody who works away from its premises, what may be recorded about them and on what basis, what a change to somebody's working arrangements requires, and which authority decides any of it all differ by jurisdiction and by the facts, and they change.

Where the examples come from

Every figure, count and example is an illustration of what one manager recorded about their own team, labelled as such on the page where it appears. None of it is a benchmark and none of it is anybody's data but the writer's own. Nothing here describes a real organisation, and no person is named anywhere on this site.