Tracking my activities through a typical week in my life.
DATA 73000 Project #2: Quantified Self
Nicole Baz, Spring 2024
Guiding Research Questions:
- Over a 7 day period, how do I actually spend my time?
- What patterns arise and where can I reallocate my time to carve out new windows of spare time?
- How do I prioritize the things currently on my plate, and am I doing a good job of spending more time on high-priority activities?
Key Audience
- Myself
- Anyone who feels like time slips away from them!
Data Tracking
The Process:
I tracked my activity via a Google Sheet for 7 days. I began tracking at the start of my work day on Friday, March 22nd at 9am and stopped tracking on Friday, March 29th at 7:00am when I woke up. For each entry, I tracked the start and end time of the activity as well as the general category that that activity belonged to. Included categories were:
- Work
- Exercise
- Grooming/Self Care
- Commuting
- Socialization
- Sleep
- Eating
- Chores
- Relaxation
- School
- Transition Time
After data collection but before conducting a visual analysis, I assigned a “Priority Ranking” for each category and its related tracked activities. I rated each category from 1 (highest priority) to 5 (lowest priority) and added that variable for each entry.
Lastly, I included a notes column for myself for additional context.
The Data:
The data can be found here. There is a main data sheet that also includes some helper columns that merge the date and time of each entry as well as calculate duration of each activity in hours. Additionally, I have a “Priority Cheat Sheet” tab that holds the ranked priority of each activity category, which was as mentioned folded into the main data set after data collection.
Data Limitations
Due to the timeline and scope of this project, I did not keep detailed logs of minute by minute activities such as scrolling on my phone, discrete work tasks, or restroom visits. This may be an avenue to explore in future iterations of this work. Also, I often multi-task and did not attempt to parse out linked events (such as making and eating lunch while on a work call).
Further, human error factors into this data set. I typically tracked my time at the end of the day as it was too cumbersome to track throughout the day. This could have lead to misconceptions/misremembering and inaccuracies.
Visualizations
Viz #1: Week view
This visualization looks at my week from a “bird’s eye” view. Hover over each bar to see what the activity category and duration was for each chunk of time in the week.
VIZ #2: BUBBLE VIEW
This view shows how the time spent by activity (color coded by category) and offers another summary view of my week and where my time went.
VIZ #3: Activity drill down
This interactive bar chart to shows how each category breaks down by activity and time.
VIZ #4: PRIORITY VIEW
This pie chart showcases my priority ratings and total time spent. Luckily, it looks like I spend the majority of my time on priority activities (ranked 1-3) vs low priority activities (ranked 4-5).
Categories were ranked as follows:
Ranked 1: Sleep, Eating
Ranked 2: Work, Exercise, School
Ranked 3: Grooming/Self Care, Socialization, Relaxation
Ranked 4: Chores
Ranked 5: Transition Time, Commuting
Design Rationale
Summary Charts
Both the bar and bubble charts offer summary views of my week. The bar chart showcases the duration of each activity and when it happened in the week, and supplemented with the bubble chart, it’s clear to see which activities were the most significant in my week. The bubble chart offers a “total time spent” layer of understanding.
Drill Down
The drill down chart allows viewers (and myself) to see if there are any patterns in when certain activities or categories are overwhelmingly represented. By adding a filter, the visualization allows viewers to compare different categories and also explore the diversity of activities within each category.
Priority Pie Chart
This simple visualization serves an important purpose for me, as it offers a concise way to see if I am spending my time on the types of activities I deem “high priority.” While there were other avenues I took to explore this, the pie chart was most effective in showing me that I am indeed allocating the most time to the highest priority activity categories.
Next Steps
A further version of this project may evaluate a longer time period and/or leverage technology that inherently does some of the legwork involved in this project. An example could be folding in Apple Watch workout tracking data, leveraging my Google Calendar events, and even using Google Maps for exact commute times.
Another improvement would be accountability in data collection to improve the quality and accuracy of the data.
