Coffee to EST

Design Process

I decided to track my daily coffee drinking habit. The data points I kept track of were the time and size of the drink for seven days. I am usually not a big coffee drinker but the past few weeks as the burn out have started to creep in, I have been drinking more than I should be. I had a few ideas of what to track but decided to go with this habit because I think it reveals a lot more than what it pretends to do so on the surface. I drink more when I work or when I am up early and lately when I am stressed. Ideally I would want to keep count of this habit as I need to cut down my intake back to my ‘regular’ 1-2 cups a day. In collecting the data, I rounded up the times to 15 min intervals. Which I then converted to a format digestible by the JSON file. I wanted to plot my habits starting on Indian standard time and translate them to school's Eastern Standard timezone.
I had some issues getting these to be as accurate as possible but after fiddling around the the loops and numbers, they are close enough to create a somewhat accurate visual to accompany my data. Link to time converter

trials and versions: square boxes with cup sizes loses overlaps

Reflection

Through this process of visualization I was able to put into context the amount of coffee I drank in a week. Although it seems that I do not have a strict schedule for drinking coffee, some patterns emerge. For example 9,10,11 am IST (22:30 to 24:30 EST) has the highest concentration of intake. There are also some gaps that shows up where none was consumed (eg.15:00-16:00 IST). The purple object that starts around 5 is due to my python class that starts at 5:30 am on wednesdays and the yellow (tuesday) line at the end is because I worked late that night. Other than that the results are congested during the day. It doesn't help that I have a coffee machine near my desk so that has been moved to the kitchen shortly after this data was collected. What was lost are the sizes, although this is because I couldn't get it to work. I wanted the 'circles' to change in size according to the coffee sizes but wasn't able to control each point of the array. I would like to come back to this and make it work somehow, for now I think this is a good representation of my habits. After this project, I have bought down my consumption significantly, 3 cups of coffee maximum a day. I would like to do this with other habits of mine, either to increase or decrease depending on the context.