One form of brainstorming that I particularly enjoy is mapping out information spaces. For example,

What are all the visualizations and analyses we could do for tracking time?

This already has one of my favorite features: enumeration. I’m a natural judger: I perceive more than I observe; I think from my gut and heart. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I love building out the space before narrowing it down.

Mapping out a space can be especially useful after an initial creative brainstorm. It forces one to consider the corners and holes one didn’t know existed.

Breaking down ideas also makes them more precise. It helps us understand the salient points, even if the direction of our decision is already made.

Below are the 7 types of time tracking information I’ve brainstormed so far.

1. Timeline, chronology, notable events

A timeline or chronology shows events over time. At most basic it is a list, such as the Visits tab on ProcrasDonate’s My Progress page.

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https://ProcrasDonate.com/my_progress/
December 13, 2009, 11:52:20

It could also be an actual timeline, where the spacing of events is based on the time the events occured. The events themselves can be marked using icons of different shape, size and color to indicate different things.

Timelines can be useful for seeing correlations between events. For example, it might be interesting to mark the end of each week with whether one’s goals were met, as well as when one visited the My Progress page, or whether the computer was asleep before midnight. Does ProcrasDonation lessen after payments are made?

2. Ranking, ordered list

Rankings list items according to some metric, such as number of hours spent on websites.

Rankings can show the hotspot websites, unless the sites at the top of the list are already optimized—I can’t use email any less!—and it is the sites somewhere in the middle that take up some amount of unnecessary time—maybe I can watch a TV show instead of a movie.

Rankings can also be useful as bookmarks, especially if more recent behavior is valued higher than behavior deep in the past. Hotspots are hot for a reason.

3. Amplitude, breakdown over time

Amplitude charts are the canonical time tracking visualization. I made these kinds of graphs first for my own life tracking. How much time did I engage in certain activities over a span of time.

This is the simplest was to view a trend over time. It’s like viewing a chronology of quantitatively comparable events.

Amplitude charts are great ways to view a break down of activities. In addition to overlapping line charts or side-by-side bar charts, one can also stack the lines or bars.

The trend tab on the My Progress page is a good start, but I’d love to see my ProcrasDonate curve broken down by the top 5 ProcrasDonate sites I visit. Then I could see what sites contribute to the different humps.

I will say that I’ve already found the trends informative. It’s clear that every other day I watch a couple TV shows. I avoid hackernews and email most days, and then splurge (note that some of the big humps are from not stopping the time tracker when my laptop goes to sleep for the night; this has been fixed!).

4. Ratio, comparison, balance

I initially overlooked ratios, but after Clay introduced us I see that they’re pretty cool.

Ratios show how much you do one thing versus another. For example, maybe you want to be producing 5 times as often as you are chilling.

Having another perspective on one’s time could be more useful than amplitude alone. People who use the Pomodoro method, which uses two timers to segregate productive time from chilling time, would find this especially useful.

I envision a simple, sparkline-esque monitor of one’s ProcrasDonate v TimeWellSpent ratio, perhaps red or green based on whether that day was above or below the ratio goal. Or we could give up the over time view and go with a dynamic pie chart, akin to the progress meters and gauges we have currently.

5. Accumulation, burn down/up, progress

Accumulation shows ones progress towards a particular total. This is my favorite motivational chart, a la the release story burn down. Perhaps more than the other information types listed so far, this one is conducive to understanding the present in relation to the past and future.

When Pivotal Tracker shows my current burn down compared to the linear burn down, I can see whether I’m on track or not right now.

Even better is when Pivotal Tracker estimates when I’ll be done. The first iteration it was quite pessimistic about my abilities. Even though I was below the linear progress line, I felt spurred on because nuts if I was going to sit still with my expected completion date 2 weeks later than the deadline!

With ProcrasDonate it would be neat to actually set the goal line. I think a burn up makes more sense, so instead of a goal line that starts at 0 hours Monday morning and rises to 12 hours Sunday night, what about a fairly flat goal line that rises sharply on the weekend? What about requiring a near flat line during the mornings? or after 10pm?

Maybe that can even influence alerts and preventative actions by ProcrasDonate.

I’d like to return a moment to my battle with Pivotal Tracker’s expected burn down line. That little guy was full of character. It egged me on in the beginning, and seemed to pat me on the back later. Our relationship is more distant now, but were it an actual cartoon character I could relate to and who responded to my behavior, perhaps I would still find it motivational.

Clay is especially looking forward to exploring this kind of user interaction. I have to say I am, too.

6. Average, compressed trend, period

Averages compress trends over time to a canonical view of some period. Averages are a meta chart, since they can average any of the information types mentioned so far.

This is pretty exciting because after a few weeks, and certainly after months and years, the chronological trends start needing aggregation, and even then there is just too much space to look at. Maybe you see a recurring pattern to your productivity and procrastination, but how do you know if you are doing better this week without making a huge change?

Averages gives you a number that you can strive against. For example, a chart might show you the average number of minutes you ProcrasDonated during any hour of the week. You might see the days of the week on the yaxis and the hours of the day on the xaxis. Perhaps you can mark regions of the chart to indicate goals and even preventive measures, as mentioned in the accumulative type above.

Maybe the points in the chart use size or color to indicate their value, or maybe the points are themselves pie charts indicating the ratio of ProcrasDonation to TimeWellSpent. Perhaps their value, instead of hours spent ProcrasDonating, is simply ProcrasDonation or TimeWellSpent, whichever occurs more often during that hour.

The averages charts can also average amplitude trends over time, and then use arrows to show the current derivatives.

Another neat averages chart is to see the day, as specified by “waking up” and “going to sleep”, with the most viewed website shown for each hour.

As a ProcrasDonate developer, I’d be particularly interested in viewing averages where the period is defined by ProcrasDonate releases.

7. Combination, overlays of above types

Finally, we have combinations, which overlay charts on top of each other.

Without fully understanding the information space, it can be easy to start with a graph that seems useful, and then add features that overtime become quite muddled. Feature creep is what happens when you stop iterating on design.

There is a good chance we find something revolutionary in the combination type. Until we build more basic types and iterate them with user feedback, I don’t even feel ready to speculate.

Proudly ProcrasDonating,

Lucy.