All in a Day’s Work: Part 3 of a Yearlong Personal Data Project
This is the third installment of a year-long data visualization journey. If you want to read the second part before jumping in, here’s the article about my movement-themed data collection!
For this timeframe, I collected data about work. My gut told me that I should start by measuring how much I get done every day, since the goal of work is usually to be productive. As a metric, I counted how many tasks I completed for the first week, including what the task was and what time I finished it.
To celebrate the accomplishment of completing tasks, I represented my data as blooming flowers. Each long, thin petal is a task I completed and the color shows the type of task. Upon review, I was proud to see that I cleared my inbox at least once a day for the entire week. I pride myself on responding to people in a timely manner, and this was a gratifying way to illustrate that I’m meeting my goal!
The second facet of this visualization is the height of the stems. Because I tracked when I completed each task, I thought it would be interesting to represent the span of time between when I completed the first task of the day and the last task of the day. Each leaf is one hour of time, so for the first day, there were 14 hours between the completion of my first and last tasks. Visualizing this aspect…
