Making the Most of my Days

Taking It One Day at a Time

Between scouting draft prospects, ranking teams, and improving my bracketology model, this time of the year was an appropriate time to share something more personal, akin to a project I highlighted at the beginning of last year. 

I embarked on a personal project to track and analyze the ratings of various days throughout my life, aiming to uncover patterns and insights. The following reflections delve into the findings, utilizing figures and graphs, to shed light on the unpredictable nature of life and the anticipated trends for the year 2024.

Burnout while applying for jobs, led me to begin this new project a year and a half ago. With 22 years under my belt, retrieving data from any time before 2010 took some work. Despite this, I gathered data points from over 1,300 days (Figure one), about 16% of my life: ranked, tracked, and described. 

Figure One

A preliminary look at the data from 2017 onwards (the first year with at least 100 data points; Figure two) wouldn’t reveal much. A scale of 1-10 results in a concentration of data and difficulty in distinguishing mediocre days from monumental ones in either direction.

Figure Two

By sorting the months individually (Figure three), we can see variance based on the month, with June being the lowest-rated month, while April is considerably higher than the other 11. Though this provides some insight, identifying that the rating is still between 5.5 and 5.8 would point toward month not being a highly significant variable. 

Figure Three

Though the month doesn’t seem to correlate quite well with the daily rating, graphing this out on a year-by-year basis, rather than combining all of the observed years might reveal the outlying months. Through analyzing this, the outlying months of June, September, and April might be better explained. It might also become clear if this is due to a single year’s polarizing rated month or if there is a trend observed for those specific months. 

Figure Four

The heat map above (Figure four) reveals that the highest-rated month of June doesn’t have a strong concentration of days rated higher than six, instead, the rating of days is shown to be well distributed, with March and December having the strongest concentration of ratings, in the 5.5 range (red). Backed up quite well by preliminary data (Figure five, noting that this takes into consideration days before 2017), our heat map reveals how the months reach that 5.7 range of rankings. This could be through a concentration of similarly rated days or a wider distribution, merely centering around a similar mean.

Figure Five

Though an intriguing exercise, not much can be taken away from this, aside from life being random and not easily modeled. I expect another random 2024, both in the occurrences, the enjoyability of the day-to-day, as well as the eventual National Champion, and who they beat to get there. 

-BM