Calendar Graph: The Demo
Last week I completed a personal project that allows me to visualize my calendar over the past three years. Let me explain:
First of all, this is incredibly nerdy, let's just get that out of the way.
Secondly, if you really know me, you know I live and die by my calendar.
Now that's out of the way, here's a little backstory:
In my underclassmen years during college, I was all about the paper and pencil planner. You get assigned homework, you write it down, you get it done, you cross it off. Easy. But, being a technical computer dude, I was always pissed when I had to literally search and find for something by hand. When was my project due? When my final for Psychology??
Luckily, I had the benefit of a good friend named Brent, who constantly pushed me to use Google Calendar. "It'll change your life!" he said. "Everything is easier and clean!" he said. "It'll cure Ebola!" he said.
Flash forward 3-4 years to present day where Brent laughs at me because I still use Google Calendar. I've got multiple calendars integrated and color coded so I can visually plan and prepare for my week. Here's my setup:
- Fun (orange): a calendar for things like hanging with friends, watching TV, and drinking
- Productive (green): stuff like cleaning my apt, buying groceries, and arguing with Time Warner
- Exercise (purple): gym, yoga, and soccer. It's been awhile since I've seen purple.
- Important (red): bills, things that must be done that day, and forgetting to text people back for so long that they are now a priority
- Work at Thinktiv (blue): This one is tricky - because Thinktiv is a consulting agency, I use my calendar to book billable hours - so it doesn't include things like lunch, spontaneous meetings, and internal work, but it is a good indicator of direct cost or "time on task"
- Other (gray): being in-transit, and stuff that doesn't fit into the above. I don't use this a bunch. I also don't record things such as sleeping, eating and mudane stuff.
For example, here's what a week in February looked like:
So I'm sitting here a few weeks ago thinking about all of this and how I've got all of this data and how I'm such a nerd, and so I decided to do something about it. You can read more about the technical details here if that's your thing.
Basically, Google has some code you can use to grab and sift through all of your data, so I went through every one of my events since the beginning of time and bucketed their hours into dates. So for a day where I recorded 8 hours at work, 1 hour working out, and 1 hour helping an old lady crossing the street, I would see 80% work, 10% exercise, and 10% productive. This is important to realize - it's not percent of time over the day but percent of time recorded.
"Why don't you just show percent of day?" you ask? Well because shit gets complicated. A lot of times if I call Time Warner while making dinner, I'll double book my hours. What about events that are marked as all day? What about events that span multiple days? Eventually you get into a gray area and although I tried to model that appropriately, I think the current graph is a better representation of my lifestyle distribution.
So what kind of things can you extrapolate from this data? Here are some things I found interesting:
- My productivity is higher at the beginning of the week, peaking around Monday or Tuesday.
- Exercising on Sundays is common. I also exercised a lot more in the spring than the fall.
- There's a pretty big "bounce back" effect on all calendars, eg. if I spend a large portion of time on "fun" you can usually see my productivity and work related tasks pick up significantly afterwards.
- My work tasks correspond closely to my project deadlines and tasks. Early spring was a very busy time for me and summer was more relaxed. This was due to client flow and deadlines.
- It's very apparent when my college finals were
- You can toggle calendars. Showing the past six months of fun vs work is a pretty cool view.
After everything is said and done, this really doesn't solve the world's problems or cure cancer, but it was a pretty cool side project to work on and visualizing data like this is not only educating, but sometimes just fun to look at.
I'll be sure to post another update three years down the road.