View the online visualization here.
Design Statement
I collected data simply by writing down data at the end of the day. There really was no special method to collecting data other than being consistent and paying attention to what I was doing in a given day. For example, when I woke up in the morning I immediately tracked how many hours I slept the night before. I simply had a journal next to my bed and wrote down the number when I woke up in the morning or immediately after I ate breakfast. I used this same process for literally every other piece of data that I used. For example, after I got done playing video games I wrote down how long I played for so that I could immediately have this information. In my opinion, the only data that was hard to collect was how many calories I ate in a specific day. I wasn’t able to track exactly how many calories I ate so I used rough estimates about how much I ate in a day. For example, when I’m in the middle of a study session I was not going to stop what I was doing and write down what I just ate. However, when I went home later than night I would track what I ate earlier in the day and used by best estimate to figure out the calorie count. I constantly used calorieking.com to figure out how many calories where associated with which food.
When designing graphs and graphics my main goal was to make my information easily understandable. In my opinion the biggest mistake a person can make when designing a graph is to overcomplicate the graphic, and I wanted to avoid this problem. To begin with, I used bar graphs to display most of my information. Bar graphs were the right choice for my project because they allowed me to display my data clearly and without clutter. My most basic graph was the graph that showed the exact number of days I slept a specific number of hours. When designing this graph I kept the generic blue color because I felt like it represented my data clearly. This graph was my most simple graph out of the three. In the next graph I showed how many hours I worked out based off of how many hours I slept the night before. For this graph I also used a bar graph because I felt like it displayed my data clearly. I changed the color of the bars on this graph to a bright yellow so they would differentiate themselves from the blue bars on the previous graph. On the final graph I showed how many average calories I eat in a day based off of how many average hours I sleep in a day. To create this graph I changed the SUM function in the pivot table to the AVG function. This allowed me to figure out the average amount of calories I ate in a day. Lastly, I changed the bars on this graph to black so they would differentiate from the previous two graphs. All in all, these graphs showed me how unproductive I am when I don’t sleep.
I learned a lot from these graphs to be honest. It really shocked me how un-productive I am when I don’t sleep an adequate amount of hours. To begin with, I noticed that I play a lot more video games when I don’t get a full nights rest. I think this must have to do with the fact that I am too tired to do anything else and video games are an easy thing to get distracted by when you’re tired. Furthermore, I noticed that I eat a lot more calories when I don’t get a full night of sleep. I think this has to do with the sheer fact that I am awake more when I am not sleeping therefore I am also eating more. I was shocked to see that one day I even ate over four-thousand calories! I’m not sure exactly what I ate that day but I am hoping to never make that mistake again. So defiantly my two biggest take-a-ways from these graphs is that I eat way too much food and play way to many video games when I’m tired. I also learned that a lack of sleep does not influence how often I socialize or attend social gatherings. There didn’t seem to be a distinct pattern related to sleep and my social outings. All in all, I found these graphs to be EXTREMELY USEFUL. In the future, I am defiantly going to pay attention to how many hours I sleep in a given night because it literally affects almost every other aspect of my life. This project was defiantly an interesting experience and something that I enjoyed a lot more than I expected.