We love New Year’s. Just something about getting a fresh, clean start gets us optimistic.
And at VisualCue, how do we celebrate anything? With data visualizations!
To help you make the most out of every minute of the new year we’ve gathered the best visualizations from around the Internet to help you get inspired.
How much sleep did Dickens get?
If we’re talking about how to make the most out of every minute, just about everyone would agree you need to make a schedule.
It’s solid advice- as it turns out, many of histories greatest scientists, artists and thinkers have kept schedules of their own, each one wildly different.
Using data from Mason Currey’s 2013 work “Daily Rituals” this first visualization shows us just what these daily routines entailed.
Getting a glimpse into the work and play patterns of these amazing people is incredible, and taught us an important lesson. There is no one schedule that guarantees productivity- the best schedule is one you can keep.
If you work best at night, that’s when you should; if it worked for Flaubert, it can work for you!
How do you start your day?
And it’s not just that keeping a schedule worked back in the day, it continues to be a great idea. Apparently, modern successful people have learned their lessons well and have created rigorous morning schedules for themselves as seen in this visualization detailing the morning routines of a number of highly influential people.
We think it’s extremely interesting to take a look at this visualization and try to find a pattern that we could emulate in our own lives. For example, it’s a pretty safe bet to start your day with exercise or catching up on social media and the news- of the 26 individuals analyzed, 14 of them started their way in one of those ways.
But the best thing about both of these visualizations is the way they use simple colored patterns. A quick glance can tell you that Balzac was a workaholic, while Hugo took a more relaxed approach. Kazoo Hirai appears to be highly regimented whilst Peter Jones likes to break his morning up a bit.
What about the rest of the day?
Now that you’ve got your morning out of the way and looked to some of history’s greatest figures for some inspiration, you might want to figure out how your schedule compares to those around you.
Good news. The team over at FlowingData.com created this amazing visualization to show you just what everyone is doing with their day.
While normally we tend to avoid the standard bar graph visualization this one caught our eye with its interactivity. The slider bar at the top of the page lets you see which activities are popular at what time of day while other parameters let you adjust for sex and age.
The graph changes as you would expect, though seeing it portrayed graphically and animate as you change filters can be an interesting experience. Seeing how a 15 year old spends their day makes us want to be kids again: leisure for days.
No matter which schedule you prefer here’s to making the most out of 2016!
Until next time,
The VisualCrew