View the online visualization here.
Design Statement
The Data:
For my topic I decided to meditate almost every day and create quantitative data on how long I meditated each day, and create ordinal data on what my mood was on a 1-5 scale, and what my productivity was on a 1-5 scale. Measuring mood was pretty straight forward, and productivity was decided on how much time I spent doing homework, studying, cleaning my apartment, running errands, etc. compared to how much TV I watched, or how much I slept in, and so on. I also recorded the days, and a simple yes or no, on weather I did or did not meditate. I didn’t meditate for around 20% of the 73 days, this was planned mainly to see if not meditating had an impact on the data as well. To record this data, I kept a log in my notebook that I would write in each day, and I kept a timer handy to record exactly how long I spent meditating each day. I also made sure not to record mood and productivity until the end of each day. Mood can change several times throughout the day, so by recording the data at the end of the day I was able to look back and give an average number for how the day went. Along with recording mood and productivity late in the day, I made sure to meditate before noon each day so it will have time to show if it made an impact or not.
The Visualizations:
For my static charts, I used a pie chart just to show what days were spent meditating versus days that I didn’t meditate. The second chart is a line chart comparing mood and productivity, I noticed that on days I meditated, both mood and productivity would go up, and go down on days I didn’t meditate. I charted these two data points together to show the relationship between the two and how they were very similar. And the final chart on the static sheet was a bar chart showing the time I spent meditating each day, this was to see the trend that the more I meditated, the longer I would spend meditating each day. As for the interactive sheet, I had four charts. Two of them are combinations of bar and line charts to show the relationships between time spend meditating and how they relate to mood and productivity. The third chart is very similar to the second chart on my static sheet, it is a line graph, however the interactive one is more detailed and it is easier to see the common trends. And the final chart is bar graph with a record of how many minutes I meditated each day, and it is clear to see that I spent much more time meditating in the second half of the ten weeks, rather than the first half.
Insights:
Before I started this project I never would meditate on a daily basis, I would on occasion – maybe once a week, but not consistently for 73 days. I mainly decided on this topic to give myself more motivation to do it more often, but I gained some insights as well. During my research I noticed that I did have an overall improved mood, and I would be much more effective with my time. This was not true for every day I recorded, but it happened enough to form a clear pattern. An interesting way to further develop this is to record another ten weeks of not meditating at all just to see if the results were truly from meditation, or if they were simply normal patterns for me. Also having others test this on themselves and recording that data would be very interesting to see. One question that I came up is what would happen if I continued this study? I noticed that the more days I meditated, the longer I would meditate each day on average, I would be interested to see if there is a limit to this growth, and to see if meditating for too long can begin to have negative effects on mood and productivity. If I were to change anything about this project I would add more data points, like recording grades on days I meditated versus days I didn’t to see if there would be any improvements, or even recording sleeping patterns while meditating.