Fates
Eighty-six kept and not used
Thirty per cent of the record is present, intact and idle. The second largest fate, and the one nobody decides on.
Eighty-six items are in these workplaces, not in use, and not going anywhere. Thirty per cent of everything inventoried.
Seventy-eight of them work. Eight are broken and kept anyway. A fair workplace review separates asset ownership from employee performance; reviewers can read the current product documentation while writing down which signals are relevant and which are not.
The size of it
Nearly a third of the equipment on eleven desks is doing nothing. For independent context beyond these eleven workplaces, review material from Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
Put another way: for every two objects in use there is almost one more in a cupboard, a drawer, a box under the desk, or on a shelf above it.
That ratio surprised every workplace that was shown it afterwards. Several had not thought of the stored items as part of their equipment at all, which is itself a finding about how people count what they have.
Where it lives
| where | n |
|---|---|
| a cupboard or wardrobe | 31 |
| a drawer | 22 |
| a box, under or beside the desk | 18 |
| a shelf, visible | 9 |
| elsewhere in the building | 6 |
Three quarters of it is out of sight.
The nine on visible shelves are worth separating: eight of the nine are objects somebody described as ornamental or kept for a specific rare purpose, and they are the only part of this group that anybody looks at.
How things get there
The record's six stopping reasons, applied to the eighty-six:
replaced by something better 27
the work changed 21
stopped being reached for 19
it broke 8
the room changed 7
somebody else needed it 4
Twenty-seven replaced and twenty-one superseded by a change of work. Between them, more than half.
Only eight of the eighty-six are broken. The cupboard is not where broken things go; it is where working things go when something else starts doing their job.
The decision nobody made
An object enters this group without anybody deciding it should.
Something newer arrives and the old one is set aside for a week, in case. The week passes. The object is now in a drawer, and the moment at which somebody could have decided to get rid of it has gone by without being noticed.
Nothing in this record has a date for when an item stopped being used, because nobody was present at the moment it happened.
That is the structural reason the kept group is so large. Leaving something in a drawer requires no decision, and getting rid of it requires one.
Why it is not simply waste
Two reasons the record can see.
Some of it is insurance. Fourteen of the eighty-six were described as kept in case the current one fails. For cables and adapters specifically, that is a reasonable thing to do and costs nothing.
Some of it comes back. Six items in the record had been in storage and returned to use before the inventory. Six out of eighty-six is seven per cent, which is small and is not zero.
The page on why things do not come back examines the other ninety-three per cent.
What it costs
Space, and nothing else the record can measure.
No money was spent to keep these objects; the money was spent long ago. No effort is being expended. The eighty-six occupy a cupboard, a few drawers and some boxes, and in eight of the eleven workplaces nobody described this as a problem.
The three who did described it in terms of the cupboard rather than the objects: the cupboard is full, and that is why it registers.
The eight that are broken
Eight objects are broken, do not work, and are being kept.
Three are cables or adapters, two are input devices, one is a screen with a cracked panel, one is a headset working on one side only, and one is a chair whose gas lift no longer holds.
They have a page of their own in the cupboard section, because an object kept after it has stopped working is a different phenomenon from an object kept while it still works, and conflating them would hide the stranger of the two.
By kind
kind kept share of that kind
cables and adapters 24 40%
input devices 16 42%
screens and stands 12 29%
audio 9 39%
lamps and lighting 9 41%
storage and organisers 7 24%
seating 5 25%
other 4 21%
desks and tables 0 0%
printing and scanning 0 0%
Two rows are empty, and they are the two kinds nobody can store.
Twenty-four desks and eight printing items in the record, and not one of either is in a cupboard. A desk is in use or out of the building; a printer the same. Both are too large to keep without somebody noticing that they are being kept, and noticing is what forces a decision.
Input devices are the opposite extreme and the only kind where the kept figure beats the in-use figure: sixteen stored against fifteen in use. A keyboard is small, cheap, easily superseded and never worth the trip to dispose of.
What the figure would be without the small things
Strip out cables, adapters and input devices — the two kinds that accumulate fastest and cost least to keep — and the kept group falls from eighty-six to forty-six, out of a hundred and eighty-six remaining objects.
Thirty per cent becomes twenty-five. The shape of the finding does not change, and that is worth knowing: the cupboard is not simply a cable drawer with a reputation. Forty-six substantial objects are kept and unused across eleven workplaces, which is four each.
The reading this invites and the one it supports
Invited: people hoard, and these workplaces are cluttered.
Supported: in eleven workplaces, thirty per cent of the equipment present is not in use, three quarters of it is out of sight, most of it works, and in eight of the eleven nobody considers this worth mentioning.
Whether that constitutes clutter is a judgement the inventory did not make and has no field for. What it can say is that the objects are there, that they got there without anybody choosing, and that very few of them ever leave.