Oohh look at these people with more than one room!
I feel ya.
Back when I was running a one-man startup, I had myself, my wife, and a cat in 450 square feet. Except when I was out gladhanding potential clients, I worked from my bed.
At least back then, I could decamp for Starbucks if I got the crazies. But today's studio apartment dwellers are really screwed. Especially if you live somewhere hot, somewhere cold, or a city that removed all of the public benches to "combat" homelessness.
I would think that the perfect setup for that size would involve a queen-sized loft bed, but with a flip-down catwalk so that getting out of bed, you swing your feet down and they hit the catwalk at what would feel like normal floor height. Then steps at the end of the catwalk to get off it.
Then have the steps and catwalk flip up during the day to give good access under the bed. On the underside would be a divider running the length of the bed in the middle, separating the two halves. Connected to that divider would be a good office desk on either side (so two people could work from home yet have their personal space).
I'm surprised that there hasn't been a real advertising push for solutions such as this during the last year. I can visualize it and probably draft up plans for it (when I do woodworking I always do my own plans). But I haven't seen this exact concept anywhere.
In houses that size, rooms convert from living -> dining -> study -> bedroom multiple times a day. Most households would have a clear time on when the mat comes out at night or when food is served or when the TV is turned on or off so the kids can study ...etc. At least that's how it was for us.
If the idea of "subsistence agriculturalist" is a US farmer, yes. Others are lucky to have a hut or some such structure.
In the developing world (and heck, in Southern Europe and the Balkans too, as recently as the 60s-70s) farmers used to live, whole family (extended one at that) in ~ 500 sq ft houses... One typical case was that brothers e.g. would often sleep in the same bed for 1 person, one with feet in one direction, the other in the opposite.
My 350 square foot studio in a luxury building in Hong Kong served my wife and I fine for the first year of our marriage. (A last minute opportunity came up for her to join me a year earlier than expected, and the brand new luxury tower next door flooded the market and made it difficult to find someone to take over my lease.)
The two of us now live in a 700 square foot 4 BR, where we use one BR as a walk-in closet and another as a study. Our landlord claims 13 family members lived in this unit when he was a kid.
700 sq ft and four bedrooms? I’m in a 700 sq ft two bed/two bath and the 2nd bedroom is tiny. I couldn’t imagine how small they must be to to get four of them.
Typically in Hong Kong, Bedrooms for those kind of apartments are roughly 40-50 square feet. You can put a bed and a night stand and that's it.
Also a lot of 700 sq ft apartment with 3-4 bedrooms have 2 bathrooms which further reduces the total available space. It's quite common for a family of 5-6 (2 kids, parents plus grand parents) + 1 live-in helper to live in such an apartment. The live-in helper usually gets a windowless closet for her room (so around 21 sq ft) that's next to the kitchen (I have a hard time with the kind of living conditions offered to helpers but I guess it's really a shitty situation in terms of space for everyone). This is the living situation of a middle class family able to afford a 4,500 usd/month apartment and a 700 usd/month live-in helper (there's no daycare available in hk which is why a lot end up getting a live-in helper after having kids).
With covid, schools have been closed and people had to work from home making things much harder.
My wife and I lived and worked the first two weeks of December in precautionary quarantine, unable to leave an 86 square foot area, along with our luggage from a 1 month trip. I was within a couple of inches of being able to touch opposite walls (the narrow way) with my finger tips. Hong Kong changed the rules from quarantine-at-home to hotel quarantine while we were out. (We booked a place 2.25x as big, but had a problem with our booking 6 hours before check-in and had to find another booking last-minute.)
I thought I might go stir crazy or have elevated levels of conflict with my wife, but it worked out okay. On the other hand, I can understand why the Council of Europe deems 8 sq. m. (86 sq. ft.) the minimum prison cell size for two prisoners.
Wow, I don't think I have ever seen an 86 square foot hotel room. I live in what's locally a small, 50-year-old suburban ranch home in the Midwestern US, but even my guest bathroom is at least that big. That really drives home the disparity behind the "we're all in the same boat" memes where one boat is a yacht and one's a castaway raft - though most seaworthy rafts are on the order 86 square feet...
For me, quarantine was the best couple months of my recent working life. My home office is way nicer (quieter, fewer interruptions, better computer and peripherals, better chair etc) than my work office, I got to have brunch, lunch, and an afternoon snack with my kids, had no commute, played fetch with the dog or took walks in the woods for breaks, got a ton of projects done around the house and in the workshop, played with my kid in his play room, and I'm a bit of an introverted hermit so being home without a stream of social visitors was really a cherry on top.
I don't know how to properly say sorry or thank you to urbanites for whom quarantine was more like a prison experiment. I guess I'll try with "I'm sorry that your experience was so difficult. Thank you so much for caring and for going through that quarantine."
Wow, that must have been rough, I was lucky in that I came back just before they changed to the hotel only quarantine. One of my friend had to go through hotel quarantine and ended up getting a windowless bedroom during the entire 14 days (the hotel website definitely didn't mention that when booking).
By the way, always fun to meet people from HN in HK, so shoot me an email and we could have lunch or drinks after the fourth wave is over.
When we came back, it was the period where (if you arrived in the evening), you'd spend the first night in a government hotel, and then 13 nights in any hotel that would take you. At 2 a.m. in the government hotel, we discovered a problem with our booking the next day. We called up one hotel's front desk at 3 a.m., and the poor guy on duty told us they accepted quarantine guests. We kept trying to get our original booking problem ironed out for the next 6 hours, but eventually gave up at 9 a.m.
Luckily, we gave the second hotel's front desk a second call at 9 a.m. to double-check they accepted quarantine guests before making our online booking. The day shift guy who came in told us that they didn't accept quarantine guests.
Now, it's a bit better organized, with an official government list of all acceptable quarantine hotels. Though, prices have gone up significantly for those few hotels. When we arrived, there was a government list, but it was just a subset of all hotels accepting quarantine guests, and of course prices shot up and vacancies vanished for those hotels on the government list.
A recent problem for me: I have only one room to myself, and prefer to keep work out of it. I am used to working outside from cafes, esp. coffeeshops, rotating my surroundings little by little. As of late, though, all relevant establishments are shut down in the vicinity, which disrupts both my work and sleep schedule.
Of course, I understand the need for such measures. Hopefully I’ll manage to continue consulting through this without losing a customer.
Have been working from home from my bedroom for the last year, got a small desk with a 27" monitor and a second hand high end office chair. At the least its significantly better ergonomics than using a laptop in bed. Downside is I can't use my camera in calls since my background looks like crap and usually has my bf sleeping behind me.
We know that having a dedicated sleeping space contributes to the quality of sleep, but there are no studies on the size and boundaries required to create that space.
Using the bed as a workspace means you're bringing your work with you to bed. You completely erase any possibility of separation between workspace and sleep space.
With only one bedroom available, your only way to assign a dedicated sleeping space is to use your bed to sleep and a desk to work.
Throwing in some anecdotal opinion, I live in a studio style open apartment and have no issue sleeping well in my bed even if I can see my workspace. I however had issues sleeping back when I lived in a smaller apartment and used the bed as my main computer space.
Is it objectively better or worst? There's no study backing either theories. However, I believe that even working on a small desk next to your bed would be better than working directly from the bed. Otherwise you'd be effectively training yourself to think about work while lying down in the comfort of your sleeping area, instead of training yourself to fall asleep and relax.
I think all of this is overemphasizing how much we are subconsciously "training" our bodies to do anything.
As with most human behavior studies, I have yet to see a sleep study that managed to satisfactorily demonstrate causality in place of correlation when it comes to working in bed ruining your quality of sleep.
In this particular case, you could imagine that people who work from their bed tend to be on screens in their bed until just before bedtime, causing them to be more "wired" than people who have a dedicated office space and avoid screens in their bed entirely.
Oh, so you have 1 room? Must be nice. I had 3 walls and a plastic tarp I time shares with a neighbor as a shower curtain, and had to tap out tcp-ip on an old telegraph machine. Got quit good, tapped out about 0.3 kb/m (kilobits per minute)
I feel ya.
Back when I was running a one-man startup, I had myself, my wife, and a cat in 450 square feet. Except when I was out gladhanding potential clients, I worked from my bed.
At least back then, I could decamp for Starbucks if I got the crazies. But today's studio apartment dwellers are really screwed. Especially if you live somewhere hot, somewhere cold, or a city that removed all of the public benches to "combat" homelessness.