Tag: dear data

Week 10 postcards are finally here for the data postcard project Sarah Bartlett and I are working on. The topic for the week was our relationship with each other. How much do we communicate, how often, when, and so on. And the timing was fantastic – Sarah and I recorded a video feedback session for #IronQuest ala business dashboards. That meant in addition to our normal back and forth we were preparing for the recording (and as always monitoring the latest when it comes to the postcards).

I chose to approach the week by focusing on the time difference between us. Sarah and I use WhatsApp to text each other and after EVERY message there is a timestamp. So this got me very curious as to what the timestamp says on Sarah’s phone. I compiled all of our texts at the end of the week and jotted down their time (in my time) in a Google Sheet. Then I did the math to offset the time and began plotting.

To demonstrate the difference in when we were talking to each other I chose to create two different time axes with the days of the week starting at the center line (Sunday) and moving outward toward Saturday. I was hoping to see a common pattern emerge around when we typically talk to each other. In reality it seems like independent of time of day we are both pretty responsive (Sarah did tell me to go to bed once). There’s one very small pattern that would probably emerge over more time – notice that Sarah messages me around noon and then I wake up in the morning and reply.

You’ll notice that the viz itself is full of corrections – I spent a ton of care crafting out a precise grid for hours and days – but fell short on labeling and that in turn influenced where I put a few data points. I also realized after I mailed it that there are times when it’s the next day for Sarah vs. me – so at best the labels for days of the week represent the days from my perspective.

Ending on a high note I created a bonus viz of emojis. My original idea was to add them as flourish to the dots, but because plotting them correctly proved difficult, I left it to a simple bar chart. Maybe a ratio would have been more effective? Ann uses 4 emojis per every 1 emoji used by Sarah.

Here’s Sarah’s postcard:

Once again Sarah delights! She’s clearly on a path of taking things to a new place of abstraction and using other objects as visual metaphors. Not only that, but she also captured MUCH more data about us – our interactions on Twitter, our postcards, and our #IronQuest feedback call. AND she included the number of cat emojis on WhatsApp. (!!) And amazingly enough – if you didn’t know it was data-driven – you’d assume it was just a sketch.

There’s more to come soon – so keep an eye out! And in the meantime make sure you check out Sarah’s take on the topic.

Week 9 of the data postcard project Sarah Bartlett and I are working on have arrived. The topic of the week was To Do Lists. I don’t actively keep good lists of tasks – they make me sad – especially when I have tasks that continue to go undone. I also think they miss describing/capturing how priorities can change. So instead of starting and attempting to track a to do list, I instead chose to track what it is I’m doing.

I’ll be more clear – because of my line of work I track all of my work using an app. It’s very detailed to include project specifics. I figured it would be interesting to see how my attention gets divided in a given week. From a data collection perspective this meant I didn’t have to do anything different – the data I have is already tracked and the behavior already exists.

So at the end of the week how did my schedule look?

I ended up creating a classic Gantt chart showing Monday through Saturday. The bars are positioned based on time, with the far left being 6 AM and the far right being 9 PM, the width of the bars is duration (in time) and the color of the bars represents the projects I was working on.

I will say this was a particularly busy week for me, as you can tell, I like to have 2 major projects going (red & orange) at a time with a significant amount of time spent on keeping the business running (the lighter blue). There’s some obvious bleed through of other projects this week, so it’s interesting to see how and when they get integrated.

All the white space is non-clocked time. Depending on where I am, I usually find myself getting up for 5 to 10 minutes and taking a break to reset or switching to a different task. I enjoyed seeing this week illustrated, because it is a good reminder that a structured 9 to 5 schedule isn’t very realistic. It’s much more fluid, with similar start and stop times for each day, but with small gaps driven by the tasks being worked on.

Sarah on the other hand chose to lean in on creating to do lists, here is here postcard:

She admits, as I have, that to-do lists aren’t really her thing (which I rejoiced!). Immediately what’s interesting about her list is that it is dominated by personal tasks. For what I am assuming is a normal work week only about 25% of her to-dos fall in the work bucket. And I’d even say that she gets a large majority of her tasks done within the day of when she sets them up. I also like the nuance of metallic silver she’s added for aging tasks – a bit hard to see in the photo, but they add tremendous design effect in person.

I’m noticing an emerging trend as we continue to create the postcards. Sarah has gone further down using other objects as abstract representations (she herself called the triangles flags) whereas I am mostly still in a more direct mode of creating charts).

In real time we’re on week 13 – so there’s more to come and more mail to catch up with the progress we’ve made.

As always, don’t forget to check out Sarah’s blog on the topic.