Visualize performance in a weekly report

As I mentioned in the 'What one thing would you add' thread, I would like to suggest another report that shows how well you performed in the past seven days. The idea is that you will have a very quick overview of your week and how well or how bad you did. You will be able to identify weak spots and strong spots and maybe even trends.

In order to visualize performance, you first have to quantify performance. In order to do that, I devised the following scheme to 'score' each bubble that you enter into Bubble Timer. This quantification could also be used for another suggestion posed by gicard to put a daily goal-gauge on the standard bubble timer interface. The idea is that as you are bubbling a certain activity, your bubbles will gradually be worth more, the closer you are to your goal (or less when it's a 'less than x hours' goal). Once you have reached your goal your next bubbles will be worth equal. The maximum and minimum scores for each bubble are 0.5 and -0.5 respectively (so they cover a range of 1).

So, let's say that for example, I have a goal for activity A of '> 1 hour'. I perform this activity for 1.5 hours today. This means that my first bubble will be 0.0625, my next bubble will be worth 0.1875, the next one 0.3125 and the fourth one 0.4375. The fifth and and 6th bubble will both be worth exactly 0.5. This means that for this activity I earned exactly 1.5 points, meaning each bubble was worth 0.25 points on average (the latter number is important for the visualization).

You can see the graphs for the scores of each bubble in 3 different situations in the picture below. Note the third situation which has a range goal which has been suggested and taken into consideration by the Bubble Timer crew. The graph for this situation is a little bit less logical, but I found doing it like this made the most sense.



Once you've got the scores for each bubble, you can total them to get a final score for each day, and you can start visualizing your performance. The way I did it in the picture below is as follows. I calculated the score of each bubble averaged over its activity. So for example, the 6 bubbles of the activity A I mentioned above had an average score of 0.25. For other activities this might for example be 0.1, 0.4, -0.3 or -0.5. Each bubble will have a score somewhere between -0.5 and 0.5. This means that you can give each bubble a color based on its score. I used red for low scores and green for high scores. Furthermore I averaged all the scores of each hour, so that I wouldn't have 96 bubbles to put next to eachother, but only 24. Note that averaging the scores over each activity, means that the colours of your bubbles in the morning might change when you go on with the activity of these bubbles in the afternoon. The more you do of each activity, the darker its bubbles will become.

This resulted in a real life situation to the picture below which shows my performance last week with the days of the week on the vertical axis and the hours of the day on the horizontal axis going from 1AM to 1AM. As you can see, my performance on Monday to Thursday were significantly better than my performance from Friday till Sunday. I spent less time working on my research project on Friday, and I didn't do much valuable during the weekend at all, especially on Saturday.You can also spot that every morning at 8 I spend a little too much time on my computer causing the light red bubbles from 8 to 9... In the graph on the right, I showed my total score for each day from Monday (top) to Sunday (bottom).



One thing I'm still not sure what to do with, is the concept of weekly goals. You could just divide a weekly goal into 7 parts, but that's a bit besides the point of a weekly goal. Or you could use a rolling week which constantly uses the data from the past seven days as its input for the weekly goal, so you don't have to deal with the fact that your goal is still running. I think the latter makes the most sense, though it might be more difficult to implement.

Any comments, questions, suggestions, ideas and/or critique are welcome of course.