Today, I turn the keyboard over to Belgian astronomy student and BubbleTimer power user Tijl Kindt who is studying in the Netherlands. A few weeks ago Tijl asked me to provide him access to his BubbleTimer data in a manner that's easier for programs to use than the spreadsheet exports. I added the ability to access your data as a comma seperated value file (add .csv to the end of the web address for a day you are looking at in BubbleTimer: http://www.bubbletimer.com/days/02-24-2009.csv) and Tijl proceeded to turn his own data into a heatmap. I'll let him explain:

Hi guys and gals!

With Sean's help I was able to access the raw data of my bubbles, allowing me to write some code that analyzes my bubbles and calculates productivity in order to visualize it. This code takes into account all goal types (except weekly goals), and it favours long stretches of productivity as opposed to alternating between productive and unproductive bubbles as was proposed by Qrystal at some point. I changed the colours from my original mock-up as the red was looking a bit too depressing. With the new colour scheme the accent is on the green so it is a bit more uplifting.

Basically, you are seeing three graphs here. The first shows your productivity by day, so it shows your evolution in the past 4 weeks. In my case this shows that I had a good streak around January 20th, got less productive after that and am now getting back up a little. The second shows your average productivity by time of the day. In my case this shows that I've been most productive in the past 4 weeks between 11am and 7pm.

The third and largest graph shows your "productivity map" showing your productivity for every hour of every day in the past 4 weeks. Here you can clearly see that my sleeping pattern has been problematic in the past two weeks, shifting left and right significantly. For the math-inclined: the first graph is the productivity map averaged over time of the day, the second graph is the productivity map averaged over date.

Obviously these graphs are not exactly what is hopefully going to appear on Bubbletimer. I don't know much about web design or whatever the BubbleTimer makers are using to make this website. I wrote this code and made these graphs just to show the possibilities and hopefully get some feedback on what could be improved.

So please let me know what you think of these graphs. Do you understand them? What's unclear? Suggestions? Comments? Questions?

Please take Tijl up on his offer and provide feedback on the Get Satisfaction topic. It's a little ways out, but I'm quite intrigued by the notion of the productivity heat map and I do plan to add this kind of report to BubbleTimer. Any feedback you can provide now will make the capability that much more useful and easy to use.

For those of you that just can't wait to get a heat map of your productivity, Charlie Gilkey of the excellent Productive Flourishing blog has a free paper form (PDF) that you can use to make a heat map manually from your BubbleTimer results.