E is for Eskwelabs Issue 80 - A Date with Data 🌹
Dear Diary, today I went on the best date of my life!💗
We created this newsletter to keep our alums, partners, and anyone interested in learning skills for the future of work updated and connected to our ever-growing community. If you want to read our previous issues, you can check them out here.
Ciao! This is Meg speaking! 😉 For this issue, I would like to reaffirm a fact: writing diaries and journals can go a long way in terms of our overall well-being. ❤️🩹 It is an activity that leads to self-awareness because it pushes us to tap into our emotions, reflect on our experiences, and keep us focused to reach our goals.
The ability to articulate our thoughts requires a certain level of clarity and introspection. 🔍 For some, this skill might be the most difficult one to develop compared to other soft skills. It is, admittedly, a habit that requires conscious effort—difficult to begin, but immensely rewarding once established. ✨ My solution: incorporate our data-driven strengths in order to make journaling more engaging and effective.
The 80th issue of E is for Eskwelabs answers the question “How can I leverage my future-relevant skills to take care of myself?” ✅
How well do we communicate with ourselves? 📝
What can we quantify about ourselves? 📊
How can we practice healthy habits? 🏃♂️
Reading time: 8 minutes
Happy Reading! 🤗
How well do we communicate with ourselves? 📝
Communication is an essential part of personal and professional success. We've focused on interpersonal communication—the exchange of ideas, thoughts, and feelings between two or more people—to improve our day-to-day interactions. 🚗 However, just as important is intrapersonal communication—how we process these internally.
Writing journals is kinda like talking to yourself. And if it’s difficult for you to start this habit and start expressing your feelings, you must first determine what language to use when communicating with yourself. 💭 Are your thoughts primarily in words, images, or something else? Once you understand your preferred intrapersonal communication style, you can start journaling in a way that resonates internally.
Take for example designers Stephanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi. These two friends wanted to check-in on each other using a language they spoke for work—data visualization! 😮 They made postcards, titled “Dear Data,” containing data about their lives expressed visually at the end of every week. 🎨 In a year, they have sent each other 104 postcards that are now displayed in the the Musuem of Modern Art in New York.
This expressive visualization contained all the information you need about how her week went, and she did so in a manner that is creative and easy to understand. 🖼️ An epitome of data-drivenness!
What can we quantify from ourselves? 📊
Inspired by Stephanie and Giorgia, I wondered how I could journal to maximize my recent work pal—Generative AI. 🤔
AI is a field of science focused on creating intelligent machines. These machines are designed to think, learn, and adapt on their own in order to fulfill tasks we humans want them to do.
Generative AI → Focused on creating new content (text, images, audio, and video) based on the dataset that is learned from or trained on.
So, I asked ChatGPT for help in getting started with journaling. I wrote a prompt that gives a context of who I am and how I prefer to perceive things. 🧠
❗ Here’s what ChatGPT suggested:
Daily Mood Meter: 🥴 Create a mood meter with different colored segments representing various emotions (e.g., blue for sad, green for content, yellow for happy, red for angry). Each day, color in the segment that corresponds to your dominant emotion and briefly write about why you felt that way.
Weekly Productivity Tracker: 💻 Design a bar graph or line chart to track your productivity throughout the week. Use different colors to represent different tasks or projects, and each day, plot the amount of time or effort you spent on each task.
Emotion Wheel: 😢 Draw an emotion wheel with different colors representing primary and secondary emotions. When journaling, point to the specific emotions you felt during the day and write a brief description of the situations that triggered them.
Habit Streaks: 🎈 Create a visual representation of habit streaks using a series of colored circles. Each circle represents a habit you want to track, and color them in or leave them blank each day based on whether you accomplished that habit.
Weekly Reflection Radar Chart: 📒 Design a radar chart with different colored lines representing different aspects of your life (e.g., work, health, relationships, hobbies). Each week, rate your satisfaction in each area and connect the dots to visualize your overall well-being.
Energy Levels Chart: 🚀 Develop a chart that represents your energy levels throughout the day using colors. Use different colors for different energy levels (e.g., blue for low energy, green for moderate, yellow for high). Journal about what influenced your energy levels.
Monthly Progress Pie Chart: 🥧 Create a pie chart to illustrate how you spent your time during the month. Use colors to represent various activities (e.g., work, leisure, socializing), and calculate the percentage of time devoted to each.
Gratitude Histogram: 💞 Design a histogram to visualize the things you're grateful for each week. Use different colors to represent different categories of gratitude (e.g., family, friends, opportunities), and write a few points for each category.
Decision Matrix: 🕶️ When faced with significant decisions, create a decision matrix using colors to weigh different factors' importance. Journal about your thought process and the factors that led to your final decision.
Dream Tracker: 🌟 Create a visual representation of your dreams and their themes. Draw symbols or images with different colors for different types of dreams (e.g., aspirations, fears, fantasies), and journal about the emotions associated with them.
The “Weekly Reflection Radar Chat” caught my eye, so I prompted further:
❗ It led me to the following instructions:
Each row represents a different aspect of your life (e.g., work, health, relationships).
Label the columns with the corresponding week number (e.g., Week 1, Week 2, etc.).
At the end of each week, reflect on each aspect and rate your satisfaction level on a scale of 1 to 10.
Fill in the chart by placing the appropriate rating for each aspect and each week.
Connect the dots for each aspect across the weeks to create the radar chart.
❗ In addition, I wanted to efficiently rate my satisfaction for each aspect. I asked for criteria:
After collecting a month’s worth of data, we will be able to use data visualizations such as bars, charts, and figures to create a story like that of Stephanie and Giorgia! ❣️ You can stay tuned for future issues of this newsletter to see this in action!
Of course, each part of this can be adjusted to fit our specific needs. Suggested journaling styles will vary as we change the prompt to describe ourselves better, and the criteria can be constructed in a way that better reflects our goals. ✅ The different “aspects of life” don’t even have to be work, relationships, etc.—what matters is we are collecting data in order to visualize our progress and make it easier to spot trends or areas that need improvement. We seek to answer the question: “What can I quantify about myself?”
This is where it becomes a ✨ meditating x data collecting ✨ exercise. We’re encouraged to reflect on what we need to track: our temper, our spending, how often we show appreciation, self-care habits, and the like. Seeing this data sketched and doodled in creative and colorful ways can help us extract insights about ourselves. 💓 This transformative habit can make it easier for us to appreciate every part of our day-to-day journey.
We’d like to see how you innovate your journaling! Comment down below 👇 or message us on our facebook page to share your ideas!
How can we practice healthy habits? 🏃♂️
A healthy personal life allows for a productive and abundant professional path. 🌌 If our “destination” is being an accomplished, well-rounded person, then we have to intentionally exert care and effort in self-improvement.
Here’s how Eskwelabs can help you with that: not only can we help you gain new skills, but our cohort-based programs allow you to be part of a community of holistic, key-shaped learners who are living examples of embodying a growth mindset. 🌱
You have lots of opportunities to be in touch with learners as passionate as you! 🤝 Since we’re journaling, here are some dates to remember:
Data Science Fellowship:
August 3 📚 - We’ll be having our second FREE Review Session! Get to know fellow aspiring data scientists and participate in a review session that will help you prepare for your Pathfinder Exams. Sign-up here:
Data Analytics Bootcamp:
August 17 🎤 - Cohort 12 is open for admissions! To learn more about the program, we’ll be having an Open House on this date in order for you to ask questions to our education team directly. Sign-up here:
August 31 📚 - On this date, future Data Analytics Bootcamp learners will review as a community to ace their application process. Register for the first Review Session here:
September 12 📚 - Can’t make it to Review Session 1? We will be having a second one in September. We will all move forward together, register here!
Demo Fest:
August 10 🚀 - Alas, the highly-anticipated event is only a week away! Register now and get a chance to connect with fellow learners, Eskwelabs members, and professionals from the field!
The journey towards self-improvement is far from being a lonely one. See you at our events! 👋
I hope this issue imparts the same feelings of awe and motivation as it did for me. Our mastery of data visualization coupled with our curiosity about Generative AI enables us to unravel new possibilities for self-improvement. ⛰️ Not only are we empowered individuals in the ever-changing future of work, but we are also leaders in growth and innovation.
Happy reflecting, Ewekweloves! 🧘
💌 Learning with you,
Meg Ruiz
Junior Content Designer at Eskwelabs