When I looked at the dataset of average time usage for people living in OECD countries, my instinct was to find the best way to visually compare the countries to each other. After dumping all of the data into Tableau, I quickly realized that any visual using all of the categories of time usage would be almost impossible to understand at a glance (chart B), so I needed to simplify it into a few important categories. I chose to limit my visualization to sleep, paid work and personal care because these three categories at a glance give you the best understanding of how people spend their time as a proportion of using their energy for production or survival and restoring their energy by time for sleep and self-care. Then, I decided that I didn’t like the stacked bar chart format because second values wouldn’t start from the same place and thus would be hard to compare across the board. Also, because of the way I wanted to view the values and limiting my selection to less than 100% of the time usage per country, the actual amount of time was less important, and thus more visual clutter, than the amount of time below or above the average time usage across the world. My first attempt at listing the averages (C) didn’t go so well, but I eventually figured out the right features to end up with a finished and readable chart (charts A1 and A2).
