This week the UK Zens are on Tour and we’re taking Makeover Monday on the road with us. And it’s Independence Day in America so I chose a visualisation about raising children in America. Happy birthday ‘Merica!

What works well?

• Nice big titles make it easy to know what the map is about
  
• The colors make is easy to see the good and bad concentrations.
• Alaska and Hawaii are neatly brought in under the continental U.S.

What doesn’t work?

• The ranges for the colors are equivalent.
  
• Using a filled map could lead to visually distortion; poor Rhode Island!
• The separate maps that you have to page through make comparisons too difficult.
• There’s no way to see a State’s ranking in all categories at once.

I iterated through lots of ideas this week and found two that I think work well.

1. I changed the filled map to a hex map then put all of the maps side by side.
   
2. I created heat maps and bump charts that show the individual State rankings in each category.
   
3. I added bar charts in the tooltips.
   
4. I included highlighting interactivity. 
   

Both views are shown below. Which one do you prefer?

Christmas...it's supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year, at least that's what the song says. Coincidentally, for week 38 (Dec 21-17), the topic was negative thoughts. Given the level of stress that I felt all week, I'm actually happy this was the topic because it helped me understand what and who was "causing" my negative thoughts.

I tracked the date, what was on my mind, the general topic, where I was, who I was with, the stress level and what I was doing.

I tend to always look at what Giorgia and Stefanie produce each week as a way of looking for inspiration. This week, I really liked how Stefanie created piles for her negative thoughts.

Stefanie included a classification of inward/outward for each negative thought then split them up so you could see how much more there was on one side vs. the other. So I went back to my data and added a similar classification. More on this in a minute.

Here are some of the highlights from the data analysis I performed on my data:

1. My inward negative thoughts more than doubled my outward negative thoughts. This means that I was keeping my negativity to myself more than expressing it to others. For me, this is good because I have always tended to just say whatever is on my mind. Does this mean I am learning to control myself a bit more?
2. Most of the negative thoughts were me by myself. Otherwise, Beth was second most involved. This really isn't surprising given it was Christmas week, we went shopping together, and every year I get stressed about how much we spend on Christmas.
3. 75% of my negative thoughts were low stress...phew!!

Explore the entire week in the Tableau story below, including my thought process for how I decided which data to put in the final viz.

I recently had a conversation with Paul Banoub and he was telling me about the impact that the Dear Data Two presentation in Vegas had on him, particularly when I talked about being nicer to people (specifically my family). This really struck me and it made me realise that I have a great opportunity through this project to really learn about myself.

So when I looked back at tracking positive feelings, I assumed that all would be rosy and great. I mean, I have a great life, a great job, a great family, live in an amazing place. Yet little did I know that I was in for a shock!

For week 31, I tracked the time, place, who I was with, and what I was doing each time I felt a positive emotion. I started by exploring the data in Tableau, which I walk you through in the story points below. The shock came when I started looking at the people I was having positive feelings with, or I should say, the people I WASN’T having positive feelings with, notably my three youngest kids. I had no idea that I felt this way until I actually looked at the data, and this is the power that this little project has brought into my life. It has helped me recognize areas where I can improve. For that, I’ll be forever grateful.

If I listen to the data, I can make a real, significant difference on my life, how I perceive people, how I treat people, and how and who I spend my time with.