Sheesh.

Introduction

This was quite the year. Hopefully one of a kind.

Quick Note

There’s a lot I could talk about in 2020. A lot of stuff that was incredibly hard to see and that shook me to my core. This global pandemic forever altered human history as we know it. I’m not going to get into all of that here. There’s a lot I could say and a lot of thoughts I have about the political strife, the racial injustice, the global pandemic, the trading frenzy, and so much more… but I want to keep this to just a small, focused review, so that I can actually get some sleep tonight.

Analysis of 2020

I can’t believe I said 2019 was a tough year to summarize… and then we got this. I’m going to keep this relatively light and quick, trying to focus on the goals and tasks, covering last year, and then focusing primarily on going forward.

I did collect a decent amount of data about myself from basically 1/1/20 to 5/31/20. Which is a decent number of days. I was good until late May about really filling out my Excel sheet daily….

Aaaand then the quarantine vibes really hit me. I’ve been lucky enough to keep my job and spend time around my roommates and the people I’ve loved, and keeping track of incremental details started to slip the mind. I got to come back to Cincinnati and there are people here who I can’t get enough time with whatsoever. In other words, I got lazy. However, one of the cool things I did was create basically a heat map with goals to make it slightly easier to visualize over time.

And here’s a close up example

The things I largely tracked were:

• Drinks the Night Before (raw count)
• Exercise (minutes)
• Reading (minutes)
• Duolingo (xp)
• Happiness (1-10 scale)
• Screen Time (minutes)
• Phone Pickups (raw count)

I did a very light - really basically qualitative review of some of the comparisons. I computed correlation between variables for the three variables Phone Pickups, Screen Time, and Happiness as that’s where - qualitatively - I saw a very slightly (albeit not statistically significant) decrease in my happiness on days where my screen time and phone pickups were up. Also as a good litmus test, the correlation was very high between screen time and phone pickups (which makes intuitive sense). And before I get attacked for not doing a rigorous technical dive and explaining if I used a t-test to get the p-value or did some type of bootstrapping and sampling - I didn’t. It was a very simple Data Analysis -> correlation matrix (which I believe is using the Pearson correlation (so really just linear relationships)). I wasn’t doing any advanced statistics unfortunately for all parties involved.

Regardless, you can take a look at some of the trendlines. The interesting bit was I mapped these out against my happiness.

Phone Screen and Phone Pickup vs Happiness

I tried to highlight with red arrows some of the noticable inverse relationship days.

Drinks the Night Before vs Happiness

Phew - doesn’t seem to be a high correlation here…. Again, quantitatively. But perhaps this is me projecting myself onto the data.

Workout vs Happiness

Interestingly enough doesn’t really seem to be a trend here either.

Takeaways

I’m not going to analyze that data too too much. I love data though (I work at a good spot for large data problems if you’re interested in checking us out). So I really loved collecting this much data about myself and using it to - really - better understand myself.

However - as with most data projects - I’m working with partial data (my own damn fault) and it’s not really the most cleansed data. I’ll have to double back down and see if I can make things a little bit more quantitative in the future.

Going into 2021

I’m going to actually take a step back from the current approach. I loved the minutiae and detail of the Excel file and I think it was a fantastic step into a key focus of goals. That is, breaking larger goals into smaller ones.

One of the gifts I got for Christmas is an Apple Watch. It was a very thoughtful gift from one of my best friends Isabelle Hudson (who is also a truly incredible artist - check her work out here).

For the first time in awhile, I bought an app, specifically designed to be more deliberating about knocking out the smaller stuffs. I want to read more, but I wasn’t really making the time, still with the daily Excel tracker in 2020. I want to become better at Italian - it’s been a long goal of mine - catalyzed by my sister exploring Italian her freshman year at Middlebury and exacerbated by my college ex-girlfriend. But again, I wasn’t really making the time. So the app I got - streaks - is meant to help aid in that process.

As of now, and again, I’m writing this in mid February because we’re just on warp speed I suppose, it’s been working really well for 2021. I want slightly more detail and I think I’ll try to keep a tab on happiness level as well going forward, but I’m liking the smaller, fewer, goals as the approach for 2021.

Conclusion

I guess the only real conclusion I have from all of this, is that I’m lucky to be here and I’m appreciative of the year I’ve had. I am beyond lucky to still have a job and for both my parents and my sister to be in good health. Even more so, I was able to spend a lot of time with the people I love - more time than I would have expected at the start of 2020. The vast majority of people haven’t been as lucky. From jobs to family to death that they’ve had to encounter. 2020 was an incredibly tough year - not only for the US but for the globe and humanity as a whole. I’m looking forward to the march forward into the future in 2021.