Calendar Query Proposal

[ziji-z]

Identify what questions you are planning to focus on

How much time I spend listening to music and how that overlaps with my productivity and activity concurrent to it? Time spent doing each type of schoolwork (reading, practice problems, procrastination). How many times I start distracting myself during times of work (biting nails, phone pickup, talk to others)?

Describe two visualizations (type of plot, coordinates, visual cues, etc.) you imagine creating that help address your questions of interest

Utilizing a scatterplot would be one of the options. The x axis could represent the date and y axis the categories of activity. The size of circle can represent the time spent and color can be a gradient where one end is productive and not very distracted and the other end of the gradient can be very distracted.

A bar graph could help represent the overlapping time spent. The x axis would be the type of work and y axis would be the time spent during that activity with the dates split up as facets. The colors would represent the varying amount of time spent on distractions as well as true productive work. The graph would also be layered with dots representing the small individual distractions such as biting nails/socializing/picking up my phone.

Describe one table (what will the rows be? what will the columns be?) you imagine creating that helps address your questions of interest

The first row will be the intended activity ie doing homework/reading. Each column would list out the level of productivity and listening habits during that activity including specific items such as time spent working, time spent procrastinating, numbers of times picked up phone etc.

[bebailey]

Tracking distractions may be hard to do (sometimes we don't realize we're doing it). Try it and see how it works out, but it sounds like you have a couple more feasible questions to fall back on if that third one is too hard to track.

How are you measuring productivity? Is it just time spent doing work that you count as productive? Or are you trying to rate your productivity after certain activities (a bit harder to deal with)?

It sounds like you'll need to set up a separate spreadsheet tracking the distraction count, so make sure you are prepared for that.

"Day" is one of those tricky variables that can be thought of as categorical (e.g., day number or day of the week) or discrete quantitative (e.g., number of days spent on an activity) or continuous quantitative (e.g., number of days spent on an activity but tracked continuously and reported in days rather hours or minutes or seconds or milliseconds). With this in mind, is a scatterplot the most appropriate choice for your second visualization?

The table described may be a little overwhelming, if I understand it correctly. Are there more useful summaries you could provide rather than showing all the data?

You're almost there. Please revise or add clarification in a new comment below, as soon as possible but preferably no later than noon on Sunday so I can give feedback/approval before you start collecting data on Monday.

[ziji-z]

I apologize for the late response.

In terms of productivity initially I was considering measuring through the amount of distractions during that period of work. However another way I can measure it is by rating it personally on a scale (much more subjective) or based on the amount of work done vs amount of work intended to be done. I think the best method would be to measure it against number of distractions.

For distractions I would log it during the moment every time I go off to do something in a separate spreadsheet.

Upon reflection upon it I think building a layered bar graph with the x axis representing the type of schoolwork/activity and the y axis representing the total time of day spent during that activity during the two weeks of data collection. Using color I will be able to describe the frequency of doing that activity during that time of day over the course of the 14 days. On the second layer could be single points or lines representing each moment of distraction.

A simpler table would consist of rows listing out the types of activity/schoolwork, the two columns indicating total time spent and total number of distractions during this activity.

My main question would be to map out the relationship between productivity and activity and time of day spent doing that activity.

[bebailey]

Sounds like a plan! Thanks for the update. Yeah, try to see if you can log distractions as you go. As long as you have a spreadsheet or even like a notes app in your phone that you eventually translate to your spreadsheet, then maybe it won't be so bad (and maybe you're not terribly distracted so you won't be logging very much anyway!!).

You're approved! Please close this issue.