I’m finally settling into a bit of a regular rhythm as a full time freelancer who’s no longer juggling additional organisational commitments or doing recruitment or handovers or various other things… just focusing on my own work. So I have a bit more regularity and headspace, and I got round to starting an online course that I bought… probably… about 2 years ago (!!) which is called “analog data visualisation for story telling“.
It is by Stefanie Posavec (she of the awesome Dear Data project) and I like it because it’s focusing not on the technical / digital skills of creating visualisations, but in the thinking that goes into finding the right questions to ask, and collecting the right data to answer these questions. The visualisation that results could be so abstract as to be nearly a work of art (as in Dear Data), or it could be very straightforward and practical to understand (as in Stephanie Posavec’s design work for museum displays for example).
Anyway, I did the first few modules and then I got to the data collection stage. I decided that for a month I would track what sort of task I worked on, at what time of day, whether I used headphones and music to focus, if the task took longer or shorter than expected, and what energy level I experienced. I made a spreadsheet and started capturing the info by half-hour slots, adding data to it between 4 and 10 times per day.
I think my question wasn’t precise enough – I wanted to find out what patterns would emerge and what insights I could gather about my working rhythms, so I cast my net quite wide about what might exert an influence or what might give me useful indications. But that meant I was gathering SO MANY data points every day – and it was so granular I couldn’t see the wood for the trees – and basically after 2.5 weeks I got super bored and I stopped.
What I did capture as well though, on a separate sheet, was a summary which only took a couple of minutes at the end of the day: how much sleep did I get, did I walk today, did I cook lunch and /or dinner, how much work did I do, how long was my work day, how did I feel overall, what % did I feel I was operating at (sometimes 120%!), did I have my morning “me time”. Also, after a jokey conversation with another freelancer I also added the phases of the moon alongside, and the phases of my menstrual cycle. Because why the hell not. I’m still collecting these data points, and I’m retroactively identifying my question to be: “what are the wellbeing / lifestyle factors that help me do my best work?”
It’s been nearly 8 weeks since I started tracking. I initially thought I would do 4 weeks of data collection, but now I’m tempted to turn it into 12 / 13 weeks (3 months) to have more data to play with. When I’ve finished my data collection I’ll go and finish the remaining course modules and pull together the visualisation. I’ll come back and update this when I do.
Update, March 2025:Tracking stuff has proved remarkably useful. I collected data in a spreadsheet from October to December, and built some rough and ready graphs to see any emerging trends. I finished the online course and clicked through the final chapter about turning the data into an actual little piece of interpretable art, which was interesting and I played with some visual language elements.
To be honest though it’s the data collection that’s proved most practically useful day to day. Over the December break I set some goals for 2025, and I started a new tracking spreadsheet to keep an eye on those. It’s a 5 minute practice at the end of the day, to reflect on what keeps me feeling well and check that I’m making progress against my goals. (Put like that it makes it sound super formal, but really it’s fun to track stuff and occasionally I notice an interesting pattern which gives me a useful insight.) I should have some actual data for an end of year review, alongside an intuitive reflection on how it went!
Photo by Ngo Ngoc Khai Huyen on Unsplash