Mapping the Mountains of My Life- Dear Data #2

As I turn 27 next month, I took a moment and this opportunity to reflect on the growing amount of roles and responsibilities that play in my life. Growing increasingly stressed and overwhelmed from the amount of life-changing decisions that I will have to make soon. I found myself structuring my second dear data assignment to this concept in order to help me find some sense of peace within this visualization.  

Contrary to my first dear data project, which was more data-driven and involved day-to-day tracking, my approach to this dear data assignment was more conceptual. Although they both required creativity, this second assignment forced me to think broader about my personal feelings about each topic and imagine what would be the best way to visualize this free flowing data so that someone could gain a great understanding from it right away. 

How to Read It

This topographic map of my life and current list of turning points is primarily represented by the number of peaks and valleys that are displayed on the map. Each peak represents a high-priority decision while the “valleys” indicate a less pressing area of focus right now. The variations in altitude and depth is a scale of how much a topic weighs in my life currently. 

About the Data

For this project, I listed out the top 10 things that I deemed needed major decision-making in my life such as career goals or personal milestones and chose to rank them by priority from a scale of 1-10 with 10 meaning most urgent. After doing so, I wanted to represent each category with a color so they could stand out visually.  Once my priorities were ranked, I began to imagine them as physical landmarks with some being tall mountains that reach the sky while others felt more attainable.

1. Run a Marathon (5): while this is a personal goal of mine, there are definitely other peaks that take priority
2. Purchase a Home/Moving Out (10): This peak definitely felt the steepest as it is a large financial undertaking as well as bit daunting.
3. Complete my Masters (8)
4. Changing Jobs or Job Promotion (6)
5. Getting Engaged (9)
6. Trip to Korea (2)
7. Reading 20 Books this Year (1)
8. Changing my diet (3)
9. Building Finances (7)
10. Spending more time with Friends and Family (4)

Reflections

After completing this Dear Data visualization, I felt a bit better because I had the opportunity to physically draw what I have currently going on in my life right now and see how it all is connected. This inter-connectedness helped me realize that it is crucial to have balance and that decision-making doesn’t have to be an end all, be all, but instead navigating across terrain. The current map is not set in stone, but just a present guide to what is currently at the top of my mind. It is expected that these categories will shift and that new peaks will emerge but it is helpful to understand where I am at in this journey.