The Dear Data Project is a year-long project by Giorgia Lupi and Stefani Posavec, two information designers. Together, they collected data from their personal lives and recorded it using postcards that they then sent to each other. From this, they were able to get to know each other while being miles apart, as Giorgia lives in Brooklyn while Stephani lives in London.

Based on their project, I completed my own Dear Data Project where I collected my own data. For mine, I tracked the number of times I found myself lost in my head. This is something in my own life I was already aware I do quite often. I tracked not only the times I found myself mind wandering, but also other factors such as whether I was intentionally doing it (which I do occasionally) or if I unintentionally did it. As well as what I was doing, such as chores, working on classwork, watching TV, or playing video games. As well as what my mind is wandering about, such as classwork, random rambling, personal issues, or just random daydreaming.

TRACKING DATA

To track my data, I used sticky notes to record everything and kept a tally of all the times I found myself lost in thought. On the last day, I admittedly lost my blue sticky notes, so the last day was tracked on a yellow one. Once I had all my data gathered, I created a proper data visualization. While Giorgia and Stephani used postcards, I ended up just cutting two pieces of printer paper down to postcard size. It was thin paper, so I used one to draw my data visualization and the second to draw the key. My first day does not have any raindrops underneath the cloud because I did not decide to start tracking the activities I was doing when I found myself lost in thought until the second day.

MY DATA

I used clouds to represent each day I recorded. I then used different symbols to represent the different topics I was thinking about, colored raindrops to represent the different activities I was doing when I was lost in thought, and then a pink thunder strike to represent unintentionally getting lost in thought, while a purple thunder strike represents intentionally getting lost in thought. I made this distinction because I sometimes do intentionally start to get lost in thought. Though from this, I found I do not intentionally get lost in thought as much as I thought.

Most of the time I got lost in thought, it was unintentional. Some days it was more even between this section, but most days I got lost unintentionally rather than not. Daydreaming is a topic that is potentially unclear, but this refers to times when I got lost in my mind thinking about fictional situations based on hyper-fixations that I have. I will literally be playing a video game, then space out thinking about a fictional situation for the fictional character in the video game I am currently playing.

A pattern that I noticed within my data is that I probably ramble, daydream, and worry about personal issues in my brain the most out of all the other topics. I also mind-wandered unintentionally versus intentionally. This surprised me because I thought I intentionally made my mind wander more than I apparently do. Though I was not super surprised to see that the two most common types of mind-wandering I was doing were daydreaming and rambling. I had an idea that I did these the most already, but I did expect to see more times I was thinking about personal issues. Another pattern that surprised me is that I seem to get lost in my mind the most while working on schoolwork or while playing video games. I was not super surprised about schoolwork being one of them, but I did not realize just how often my mind wanders while playing video games until I started tracking it.

CONCLUSION

Overall, I think that I was successful in tracking my own data to see how often my mind wanders. Something I would do differently if I were to do this again is to try to gather data on more days when I am doing more stuff outside of my house. For most of the days I gathered data, I stayed home, which made it easier to gather data, but I would be interested in having data from more busy days of mine.