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Some friendly advice: your charts are almost impossible to understand. They may make sense to you, but they are utterly meaningless to most anyone else. I sugge

Some friendly advice: your charts are almost impossible to understand. They may make sense to you, but they are utterly meaningless to most anyone else. I suggest that as you continue writing, you should take a step back and try to read it from the point of view of someone that has no previous knowledge of anything about you. This could help you focus what you write about and make things more succinct, because most people won't read a wall of text either. One other piece of advice is to cut down on what you're trying to do. Like you said, you have way too many projects going at once. Focus on a single project and stop worrying about trying to save the world. Dedicate 8 hours a day to the project and as you accomplish goals, move forward. Spend 1-2 hours a day exercising. And if you want to spend it on youtube videos, then use your 8 hours a day on that, but realistically that doesn't appear to be very promising. I took a year off about 10 years ago and I had a single project I worked on 8 hours a day. Once I spent 3 weeks just trying to increase the accuracy of my OCR from 93% to 98%. It's dumb, but that's freedom to pursue things just to learn. Take advantage of your freedom by focusing on the long tail, you can go very very deep into areas where you normally wouldn't have the opportunity.

sicromoft 7y ago
Some friendly advice: you called his charts utterly meaningless but didn't give a single specific issue you had with understanding them. While it would've helped to have unit labels on the Y axis, I was able to understand all of them. Also, "wall of text" generally refers to a long piece of text lacking formatting, punctuation, and separation into paragraphs and sections. This article, while long, does not have those problems.
- lgg 7y ago
  I'll provide a specific issue I had, which is that the charts don't provide good units or labels. For example, on the Week by Week breakdown chart the vertical axis is labeled "Duration" and and has bars that range from 0 to ~2.0, but no units written there. Neither hours or days really make sense (hours are too short, and from the rest of the post it is pretty clear the author works more than 2 days per week). Now going back to look over the post to write this response I happened to mouse over the chart (something that I could do because I happened to be at my computer, but something I missed the first time on mobile) it actually showed me the values for each segment, and I was able to figure out what was going on. The units are days, but they are 24 hour days (since the entire post is about work schedules I would have assumed 8 hour days). That explains why the maximum tend to be ~2 (because 2 days is 48 hours). The chart would be a lot more intuitive if the duration was in hours, and no matter what the units should be labeled explicitly (in this case I would use "24 hour days").
- ggggtez 7y ago
  The advice doesn't seem friendly, and ignores valid points. I agree with the above poster. The article is long and meandering. Let's raise some specific complaints: >So if you see "2 days 18 hours" that means "66 hours total time spent on this activity". Completely superfluous. He goes on for 3 sentences explaining that a day contains 24 hours. WOW! AND he couldn't figure out how to keep his units, or make it unitless. Chart 2: >Here's how my work week tends to break down: We break down the day into 4 time frames. Why? When does each timeframe begin and end? If the time is for a "work week" then why the hell does "monday" contain almost 200 hours? That's for 6 months, you say? Why?! It should be an average for a work week! No one intuitively knows how many hours occur on mondays over a 6 month period. Is that a lot of hours, or a few? You would have to do some mental math to even interpret this chart. Chart 3: >stacked bar graph Enough said. It's impossible to comparatively interpret stacked bar graphs over time. You want to use a line graph when you want to compare things over time. Tell me, did he spend more time podcasting on 7/21, or the week after that? "Obvious!" you say, "he spent more time! It's clear!" Look again, however! The next week is 7/28, but the next label is 8/18. What? Where is 7/28? The labels are seemingly randomly distributed, with no rhyme or reason! Eventually you find 7/28 and lo-and-behold... they look about the same, but had to mouse over it to check, didn't you? Because they are separated vertically by nearly the entire chart. And we didn't even get around to Happiness 3.0 Make a Change App Activity, which contains 41 distinct labels, and you can only read 3 of them at a time, and has all the same problems as the above... Or the Instagram chart that seems to contain the entire message as the label? Does an instagram post take 4 hours to make? What does this chart even mean? Let's not sit here and suggest that it's "friendly advice" that a person isn't being helpful when they don't defend every statement they make. Anyone who tried to read this, actually read this, would immediately see that these charts are garbage and nearly meaningless. They probably make sense to the person who made them, but as a method of conveying information in a blog post to others, we can criticize without writing a dissertation about the mistakes here. ^ unfriendly advice
  - setr 7y ago
    curiously, that third graph for me has order 7/7 7/14 8/18 8/25 7/21 8/4 If you didn't mistate the dates, then it might even be changing its random distribution :-)
- ryandrake 7y ago
  To add some support to GP: I couldn’t figure out any of the visualizations either, especially the days in the week table. None of the days even add up to 24 hours.
eveningcoffee 7y ago
I don't know, these charts were quite intuitive for me. Of course these are not without faults. First one is obvious. Second one becomes quickly clear when you realize that it has to be total of hours over some period of time. Otherwise it would not make sense. Third one is quite interesting. It is very informative and interesting to observe. These charts could be made better naturally. Title and short description would definitely help. For the second one I would also include totals - for each day, for each time period and most importantly grand total that has to be the same for days and periods. Also small explanation that this is hours distribution over period of this and that. For the third one I would fix units of the duration. Current ones are difficult to interpret. Hours scale would make the most sense probably - 10, 20, ..., 40 (a normal work week, in the middle), ... 80. I do not think that there is nothing bad in having multiple interests. Distributing ones time between multiple interests is a difficult task to tackle but it does not make it automatically meaningless. It is actually a good idea to have some time management and good data always helps.
- piva00 7y ago
  The charts aren't intuitive at all when I got to the stacked bar charts, the labelling threw me off quite quickly and I couldn't track the changes or what they meant overtime.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

sicromoft 7y ago

Some friendly advice: you called his charts utterly meaningless but didn't give a single specific issue you had with understanding them. While it would've helped to have unit labels on the Y axis, I was able to understand all of them. Also, "wall of text" generally refers to a long piece of text lacking formatting, punctuation, and separation into paragraphs and sections. This article, while long, does not have those problems.

lgg 7y ago
I'll provide a specific issue I had, which is that the charts don't provide good units or labels. For example, on the Week by Week breakdown chart the vertical axis is labeled "Duration" and and has bars that range from 0 to ~2.0, but no units written there. Neither hours or days really make sense (hours are too short, and from the rest of the post it is pretty clear the author works more than 2 days per week). Now going back to look over the post to write this response I happened to mouse over the chart (something that I could do because I happened to be at my computer, but something I missed the first time on mobile) it actually showed me the values for each segment, and I was able to figure out what was going on. The units are days, but they are 24 hour days (since the entire post is about work schedules I would have assumed 8 hour days). That explains why the maximum tend to be ~2 (because 2 days is 48 hours). The chart would be a lot more intuitive if the duration was in hours, and no matter what the units should be labeled explicitly (in this case I would use "24 hour days").
ggggtez 7y ago
The advice doesn't seem friendly, and ignores valid points. I agree with the above poster. The article is long and meandering. Let's raise some specific complaints: >So if you see "2 days 18 hours" that means "66 hours total time spent on this activity". Completely superfluous. He goes on for 3 sentences explaining that a day contains 24 hours. WOW! AND he couldn't figure out how to keep his units, or make it unitless. Chart 2: >Here's how my work week tends to break down: We break down the day into 4 time frames. Why? When does each timeframe begin and end? If the time is for a "work week" then why the hell does "monday" contain almost 200 hours? That's for 6 months, you say? Why?! It should be an average for a work week! No one intuitively knows how many hours occur on mondays over a 6 month period. Is that a lot of hours, or a few? You would have to do some mental math to even interpret this chart. Chart 3: >stacked bar graph Enough said. It's impossible to comparatively interpret stacked bar graphs over time. You want to use a line graph when you want to compare things over time. Tell me, did he spend more time podcasting on 7/21, or the week after that? "Obvious!" you say, "he spent more time! It's clear!" Look again, however! The next week is 7/28, but the next label is 8/18. What? Where is 7/28? The labels are seemingly randomly distributed, with no rhyme or reason! Eventually you find 7/28 and lo-and-behold... they look about the same, but had to mouse over it to check, didn't you? Because they are separated vertically by nearly the entire chart. And we didn't even get around to Happiness 3.0 Make a Change App Activity, which contains 41 distinct labels, and you can only read 3 of them at a time, and has all the same problems as the above... Or the Instagram chart that seems to contain the entire message as the label? Does an instagram post take 4 hours to make? What does this chart even mean? Let's not sit here and suggest that it's "friendly advice" that a person isn't being helpful when they don't defend every statement they make. Anyone who tried to read this, actually read this, would immediately see that these charts are garbage and nearly meaningless. They probably make sense to the person who made them, but as a method of conveying information in a blog post to others, we can criticize without writing a dissertation about the mistakes here. ^ unfriendly advice
- setr 7y ago
  curiously, that third graph for me has order 7/7 7/14 8/18 8/25 7/21 8/4 If you didn't mistate the dates, then it might even be changing its random distribution :-)
ryandrake 7y ago
To add some support to GP: I couldn’t figure out any of the visualizations either, especially the days in the week table. None of the days even add up to 24 hours.

eveningcoffee 7y ago

I don't know, these charts were quite intuitive for me. Of course these are not without faults. First one is obvious. Second one becomes quickly clear when you realize that it has to be total of hours over some period of time. Otherwise it would not make sense. Third one is quite interesting. It is very informative and interesting to observe. These charts could be made better naturally. Title and short description would definitely help. For the second one I would also include totals - for each day, for each time period and most importantly grand total that has to be the same for days and periods. Also small explanation that this is hours distribution over period of this and that. For the third one I would fix units of the duration. Current ones are difficult to interpret. Hours scale would make the most sense probably - 10, 20, ..., 40 (a normal work week, in the middle), ... 80. I do not think that there is nothing bad in having multiple interests. Distributing ones time between multiple interests is a difficult task to tackle but it does not make it automatically meaningless. It is actually a good idea to have some time management and good data always helps.

piva00 7y ago
The charts aren't intuitive at all when I got to the stacked bar charts, the labelling threw me off quite quickly and I couldn't track the changes or what they meant overtime.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]