This is not exactly an illustration project but it’s a personal project I’m very attached to and I thought it deserved a place here.
A bit of context:
I love mixing up my hobbies. Drawing, music, dancing, and all other things I spend my time on. A while ago, I discovered the project “Dear Data”, from Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, where they create beautiful hand drawn representations of all sorts of data. Inspired by their postcards and their book “Observe, collect, draw!”, I decided to keep track of some of my habits in 2020 and started a personal projects using data visualisation. For a year, I would keep track and visualise the time I spend on any music-related activity (this includes dancing, and learning and playing music, which are the activities that took up most of my free time at that moment).
Little did I know back then that 2020 would turn into the year that it was, and that it would turn all my routines and hobbies upside down. Even so, this was a been a very fun project to do and I enjoyed every bit of it 💛.
Some conclusions and thoughts:
- In 2020, the year that turned everything upside down, I spent aprox. 470 hours on music-related activities (~313 learning and practicing music 🎼 and ~157 dancing 💃).
- I kept track of the time I spent on every activity in a Google Sheet, which I tried to update almost daily 🤓 At the end of each month I would add this data to the poster.
- Nope, I didn’t use a timer ⏱️, so the time tracked is always an estimation and I’ve tried to keep it as accurate as possible. Also, I didn’t use a ruler 📏 to measure how long each bar was, so this is also a visual estimation. My goal was not to make it 100% accurate but to have a visual overview at the end.
- In a “normal” year the numbers would have been completely different. Dancing would have been a much bigger part of it, including live music, socials and festivals 💔 But this was the year of the online classes, online concerts, online jams and online dance parties (had I known this in advance, I would also have added an “online” category in the legend 😅)
- On the positive side, staying at home gave me much more time than expected to play music 🎹
- Keeping track of everything also motivated me to do it more often (especially practicing piano), even if it was just 15 min a day 💪
- This unexpectedly helped me so much during the lockdowns 💛
If you’ve read until here and are still interested, you can see each detailed month in the highlighted stories on my Instagram 😉
