Everyday Data Vis — 2019 in Review
For about half of this year, I’ve been trying to set myself little month-long data projects to uncover interesting things in my life, as well as explore different visualisations. To wrap the year up, though, I’ve got something a bit different — data I’ve been collecting since January 1st.
As usual, I’m not getting paid to promo anything, but this wouldn’t have been anywhere near as easy without one of my favourite apps, Tally.
The methodology
Tally is basically a tracker app. You can set up anything you want to track, set intervals, and just watch the numbers go up. I discovered this app around the end of last year, so I decided to pick some things I thought would be cool to visualise over a year and started on January 1st.
Tally also has some really beautiful visualisations in the app, but since a lot of this project was supposed to help me practice graphing, I made my own anyway!
My accent is weird.
So for those of you who haven’t met me in person before, I grew up all over the place and as a result have a bit of an odd expat kid hybrid accent. It’s pretty inconsistent and so can be kind of hard to place.
I thought it would be fun to see just how much I actually get asked about my accent, so I tracked every time somebody said something like, ‘Your accent is weird,’ or asked ‘So… where are you from?’ if that led to the accent conversation.
I was asked about my weird accent 54 times in 2019.
There aren’t any surprising correlations here — basically, the more new people I met in a month, the more likely I was to be asked about it. The only real notable ones are January, where I started working at A Cloud Guru, and then in August there were a lot of parties. 🤷♀️ The more interesting thing might be to see how this changes in 2020!
I could stand to read a bit more.
Originally, I decided to track Books Completed since I thought it would be a good motivational tool. Realistically, most of what I did in 2019 was buy books to add to my collection, not actually read them. I completed 4 books this year.
In January and February I read Bad Choices and Man vs Big Data, during which I was determined to finish one book per month!
There’s a clear section of laziness in the middle. Even though I finished Quirkology in November, I actually started reading it in March and just… wouldn’t finish the last chapter. Not sure why, it was a good book.
I read Everybody Lies in September within a couple of days. I’d gone to America for a holiday in the first half of the month and bought about 10 books for myself, and the premise of this one just drew me in. I’m partway through about three of the other books so far, so here’s hoping this chart is more exciting in the future.
Bubble tea!
My sugary vice… I had 41 bubble teas this year, which is about 1 a week most weeks! Weirdly, I didn’t go a single month without at least 2… and that’s the real tea.
Below is the breakdown for teas consumed over the entire year, day by day. The real trend is that they’re fairly evenly spaced, and I tend to consume bubble tea on Fridays or the weekends. My office tends to do bubble tea runs on Fridays too — ultimate office perk!
Here’s to more tea in 2020!
Rockin’ on!
One of the things I decided to do more at the end of 2018 was to see more bands live — and I definitely followed through! I saw 13 concerts/gigs over the year.
Everyone I saw this year: Phil Collins, Hands Like Houses, Bananarama, Transience, Spit, Dead Preachers, LANY, Purr Usual, Grinspoon, Pearl Bay, Chase Atlantic, U2, Sir Andrew & the MSO.
It was actually a cool mix of big, medium, and small bands — 3 were at stadiums, and 3 were at the Forum (a mid-sized venue).
Meetings, meetings, meetings.
I attended a round 600 meetings in 2019. Considering I went to work on 222 days (so, not counting any days I was sick or on leave), that means I have about 3 meetings a day on average.
You can see that there’s a few dips in the above graph, even though there’s generally an upward trend.
At the end of May, I complained at a retrospective that we were having too many meetings, and they dropped pretty immediately. There’s another dip in September, where I was on holiday for half of the month (so if it had continued at that rate, it probably would have overtaken August). And then in November, it drops partially because I was off sick for over a week, but also because I switched teams.
The meetings start getting aggressive at the start of April, with the first 5-meeting day. The meetings got most intense at the end of September, with an 8-meeting day and regular 5- or 6- meeting days.
In terms of what counted as a meeting, it was basically anything that had an event in my calendar. So this doesn’t include any times somebody asked me a question and it turned into a one-hour conversation… that probably would be a lot more intense than this graph!
It was a sleepy year.
Over the year, I had 116 naps, which is about one nap every three days.
It tends to be more likely on Saturdays, but otherwise there aren’t any particularly revolutionary patterns. They tend to be more frequent when I’m sick — in November, I was sick for almost two weeks and took at least one nap per day.
What would’ve been cool — I didn’t track any other information about these naps, such as comparing sleep quality, time of day, or length of nap. Maybe a nap study is in my future.
And it was a colourful year!
I started dying my hair in 2018, and since I can’t really stick to a colour, I thought it would be fun this year to record how many comments I get about my hair. I had 9 different colours this year, all thanks to my favourites at Blondies of Melbourne.
All in all, I got 433 comments about my hair over the year. When I say comments, it’s basically anything acknowledging the colour — so hairstyles didn’t count. I also didn’t count anything where I initiated the conversation, since that felt like it could be a bit leading.
It’s a bit more obvious in the below chart, but the comments are pretty predictable. I get my hair coloured every other month, and the comments peak around then too. Basically, if the colour is new, I get more comments!
It’s even a bit clearer with the days of my hair appointments marked. Usually in the second month the comments tend to taper off, but a few will pop up here and there — usually commenting on how pastel it is by the end!
Above you can see all of the colours I had during the year and how many comments they each received! In terms of sheer numbers, my sunset half-and-half hair was the most popular.
If you normalise them all to have been over the same number of days, however, the most popular is the rainbow prism, and the least popular is the pink and purple. (I left out the bleach day and the days that cross over onto other years.)
Conclusion? People tend to comment the most on more complicated, more colourful hair. Not really that revolutionary, but still fun to see.
And that’s a wrap!
2019 was definitely a big data year for me, but I’m looking forward to seeing what 2020 will bring in terms of numbers.
Coolest finding
Yikes, those meetings are scary. Hopefully we can cut them down or make them more effective in 2020!
Most difficult thing
At the start of any data project, the biggest issue I have is always making sure I remember to record things. The plus side of this being a year long meant that I got into the habit pretty quickly, but there are some things I should’ve recorded in more detail. For example, I tracked the movies I watched in 2019… but I didn’t write down the titles.
What’s next?
Here’s to 12 new everyday data visualisation topics in 2020!
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