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Analyzing time spent: Time management with box and whisker plots

We all know that there are only so many minutes in a day, and that goals like being more productive and effective hinge on things like better time management, that is, working smarter not harder. This is particularly true if you think you’ve got a pretty standard process in place. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate a visualization tool called a box and whisker plot. This tool will help you determine how long you can typically expect your standard process to take, and how to spot when there’s enough variability to say that it’s time to reexamine what you’re doing, so you can:

streamline a process for yourself, or
identify when it’s time to schedule a training or other intervention for your staff.

If you can find the middle thing in a list, you can do this time analysis.

Choosing the “right” visualization: A diversity, equity, and inclusion example

When we talk about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, we frequently turn to the data to see how we’re doing relative to our own internal goals, and, as possible, how our efforts and relative success rates compare to those in our local communities and others in our industries. That is, we typically talk and think in terms of benchmarks and progress towards a target percentage. But we don’t just need to wrangle and analyze the data. We also need to communicate the findings of the analysis so that we can figure out what to do next, and this is where choosing the right visualization comes in. In this post, I discuss how different visualization choices enable different understandings of the data, and different conversations and decisions around the data.