A few months ago, I realized I was spending far too much time on my phone, and that I could dedicate that time to activities I genuinely love. Unfortunately, my phone had become an addiction, and reducing screen time wasn’t proving to be an easy task. So, in an attempt to inspire myself, I came up with the idea of representing my progress in an aesthetically pleasing way (in my best Carlos Cruz-Diez way), hoping to encourage myself to continue using my free time for hobbies that truly fulfill me.
Once I had decided which data I wanted to work with, I proceeded to record the average amount of time I spent each day on my hobbies and saved the information on an Excel spreadsheet. I also recorded my screen time each day in the same table. Once I had collected data for a whole week, I designed my UI on Figma (click here if you want to give it a look).
The sketch works as follows: once inside the program, the canvas will be empty. Click on one of the days of the week to see the graph generated by the program, using data imported from the .csv file containing the register of minutes spent on each activity. The program will generate a square only for those activities in which at least some time was spent that day. The size of each square is proportional to the amount of time spent on each activity. Each time you click on a day of the week or on the “RESET” button, the position of the squares changes, generating a completely different piece of art, unique for each day. The “TOTAL” button prints on screen the average of minutes spent on each activity during a week, and the “CLEAR” button clears the canvas, returning it to its initial appearance. Finally, if we hover over the titles of each activity, we can see the number of minutes each square represents.
If you want to use the app to track your own hobbies and personal screen time, simply open the Excel file and change the header name for each hobby accordingly (columns from 2 to 7, the 7th being screen time minutes) and register your own timing for a week.
Note: this version only supports up to 6 hobbies (sorry, multitaskers), and all files are only in Spanish.