QS2 | How often do I look at the time?

My Dad and his siblings often tell me stories about how my grandmother raised six children as they were growing up - and central to this was time management.

Time management is certainly something I've struggled with, particularly when I was in my teens as well as in my first couple of years at University. And one thing I could not fathom, was "working by the clock hand" (as the literal translation of the Gujarati phrase my parents used goes)

Something interesting happened when I went on my placement year - I began working through targets; setting time goals for me to get something done, in order to break a task (or tasks) up. And this is where time was central to the entire process. So for the month of November, I tasked myself with tracking how often I look at the time.

Given we're actually surrounded by prompts to what the time is, a parameter I set myself was to only log the times I looked at a clock to when I wanted to know the time - so subliminal glances to the phone, computer etc. I didn't actually clock.

In order to do this, I once again used Google Sheets as well as IFTTT's DO button. The DO button is essentially a trigger to a IFTTT recipe (or as they recently rebranded, applet) which does a certain action. In my case, I just wanted a time, date and (for the fun of it) place of where I logged the activity.

When I started building this visualisation, a calendar was the first thing that sprung to mind, with histogram bars - I'd recently used T-bar charts on a piece of work I'd done for a client, so I wanted to trial using it for this visualisation. The other thing I wanted to focus upon was how it differed hour by hour - and there were some times where I'd logged time after waking up at night, checking the time, and pressing the DO button!

I have to give a shoutout to my colleague Will Griffiths here - He gave me some great feedback on the first iteration, which included the calendar-T-chart combo - and we both agreed that it was very distracting. 

Check out my process below (it's fairly long!)

What I really enjoyed about this viz was the annotations - I wanted to give some personal context to the viz, to act as comments as well as cues to the consumer of the chart. The objective of having the tone was to emphasise the idiosyncratic narrative to accompany the visuals.

Finally - I built this in Tableau 10.2 Beta, so I am unable to upload the visualisation yet! But it was an enjoyable experience to format and build in 10.2... just being able to globally get rid of gridlines was fantastic! 

Check out the viz below, and I look forward to reading your feedback!