Graph Your Day
Project Overview: Track how you spend every hour of your day in real time and turn that data into graphs (using a pencil & paper or Google Sheets/Excel). You will sort your time into categories like sleep, school, reading, screen time, and anything else of your choice! Calculate what percentage of your day each category takes up, and then visualize your results (bar graph, pie chart, etc.).
Materials:
For hand-drawn graphs
Writing utensils - pencils, colored pencils/markers, eraser
Plain white paper
Ruler
For Google Sheets graphs
A computer
Instructions:
On a sheet of paper (or in a Google Sheet), draw a table with two columns: Category and Hours. The Category column should have your listed categories: School, Homework, Eating, Hobbies, Reading, Sleeping, Other, etc.
Assign each activity that you do to these categories and estimate how many hours you spend doing them. Keep in mind, your total should add up to 24.
For each category, divide the hours by 24 and multiply by 100 to get the percentage of your day! Note down the percentage for each category.
On a new sheet of paper (or in a Google Sheet), draw a bar graph with your categories on the x-axis (the bottom) and the hours on the y-axis (the side). For each category, draw a bar that amounts to its hour total. Using your colored pencils or markers, make sure each category is in a different color.
For your next chart, draw a large circle on a new sheet of paper. Draw a slice for each category, where the size of the slice represents that category’s percentage of your day. Label each slice with the percentage. Fill in each slice with a different color, making sure each color matches what you used in your bar graph. Add a legend to the side of the pie chart indicating which color represents which category.
Reflect on your data. Which categories surprised you the most? What takes up most of your day? After this exercise, is there anything you would want to change?
