You don't have to be a data scientist or a Bayesian statistician to tease useful insights from data. For 20 years, I've used a simple exercise to help those with an open mind (and a pencil, paper, and calculator) get started. One activity won't make you data savvy, but it will help you become data literate, open your eyes to the millions of small data opportunities, and enable you to work a bit more effectively with data scientists, analytics, and all things quantitative. Each stepin this assignmentillustrates an important concept in analyticsfrom planning for data collection to understanding variation todatavisualizationand clear communication.

Objective(s)

• Demonstrate how to apply the data analytics process from initial question to reporting
• Communicate each step in the process clearly and concisely using data storytelling techniques in the Slidedoc format

Instructions

Each of you will answer the same basic question: How do I invest my time in a week? Because everybody has an equal amount of time-168 hours (24 hours/day x 7 days)-but uses it in different ways. Hopefully, it will be insightful to analyze what a typical week looks like for you.

Brainstorm with your assignment partner. Start by thinking about both of your lives and how you use your time to identify your main categories and sub-categories. Most of you will have a minimum of four main categories and possibly one to two others depending on your lifestyle. There's no right/wrong answer-it depends on what's important to you.

For a paired work select some (at least 3) main categories which are similar to your assignment partner. Other categories can be different.

Main Category	School	Me Time	Family	Sleep	*Other
Sub-Categories	Classes Homework/ Assignments Studying Admin	Watch Listen Read Hobby Fitness Sport	Meals Chores Time w/partner Time w/kid(s) or Kid stuff	Zzz...	Part-time job Pet Hobby Fitness Sport

Situation Overview

Paint a picture (so to speak) of your lifestyle to help the audience understand how you're approaching the question based on your specific situation.

• Describe both of your current situation to give background/context in separate slides.
• Identify your main categories - discuss which categories are same to your assignment partner and which are not.
• Based on your situation, identify at least two of the categories of yours and your assignment partner's that is interesting to investigate more in-depth (using the sub-categories) based on an assumption and/or hypothesis you have

Data Collection Plan

Outline the specific plan to get the data you need to answerthequestion.Use the correct terminology.

• In a table (like above), identify thecategories and sub-categories of data you are going to capture as individual data points
  • Define any data points that mightneed definition
  • Recommend working in 30 and 60 minute increments
• Describe how you have collected the data and the timeframe
• Identify data sources used to collect data (i.e.pen/paper, smartphone, tracking app etc.)
• Describe your confidence in the quality of the data you collected
  • Is the week you picked representative of a "typical week"?
  • Did you diligently capture the data as planned?
  • If necessary, briefly explain if you had to adjust the original plan after you started to collect the data

Raw Data Set

Organize and display the raw data you collected in a table-include this as an Appendix at the end of the report

• Don't get so complicated that the data can't clearly be shown
• Show data for each day and time increment
• Use a legend to colour code each category if it helps
• This should be "raw data" so no doing analysis like ranking, totals, percentages, graphs

Analyze the Data

Doing analysis means combining, organizing, ranking the data in a way that makes sense for the questions to uncover relationships and results.

• Analyzes the main How do I invest my time in a week? Question for both you and your assignment partner.
• Analyzes (at least) two categories in-depth that you're curious about you and your assignment partner's (based on your assumption or specific hypothesis)
• Explain ('tell') what you are seeing in the data-i.e. patterns, trends, outliers
• Create data visualization ('show') like bar graph and/or pie chart to complement the narrative
  • Need to use different types of charts.
  • Need to use comparative charts.
  • Need to have two data series charts.

Evaluate what you're seeing in the analysis based on the important questions. What insight(s) emerge?

• Identify the main insight(s)/"ah-ha!"/takeaway from each analysis-the most important one to two things (that could help you moving forward

Combined Recommendations

Make four (4) recommendations for yourself and your assignment partner:

1. Continue to keep doing something that's workingfor both of you
2. Change something both of you're doing to make it better
3. Stop doing something that's just not workingfor both
4. Start doing something newfor both