Introduction
I am proud to say I survived Dashboard Week. It was hard but very rewarding. I want to share my experience and hope that this will be helpful to future cohorts that will do the same in the future.
Strict Timeboxing
On this activity, we have limited time to prepare the data, create a viz and publish a bog. I have to say timeboxing is king. There’s one day when I did not follow it and my sleep time suffered a lot. When I already found a good enough story to visualize, I stick with it. After finishing a working viz, I made sure the basics are working and correct like filter, tooltips, proper labels and chart’s interaction to each other. I have to finish a blog before the day ends and dedicate 30 minutes to work on my presentation the next morning. When I have free time, that’s the time I work on the non-crucial aspects like the colour theme and PowerPoint presentation.
Frequent Saving and Version Control
For different reasons, the applications you use may unexpectedly crash. My habit of hitting Ctrl + S literally “saved” me a lot of times. It’s not too late for you guys to start developing this habit specially in Dashboard Week. I also recommend to have a good version control strategy specially when you try to do something different or explore other options. One of the worst feelings is recreating something where you dedicated a large amount of time and effort.
Try Something New
Dashboard week is the best time to try things you haven’t done before. Believe it or not, I haven’t tried creating a donut chart before this. Another chart I created first time this week is the circular bar chart. Explore and have fun.
Working From Home
One factor that really affected our performance is the fact that during the dashboard week, there’s a stay at home restrictions in Greater Sydney. The extra time we got from not preparing and travelling to office allowed us more time to work on our analysis, dashboards and blogs.
Daily Blogs and Dashboards
If you want to read my blogs for each day of the Dashboard week, you may check them here. The final dashboards can be viewed in Tableau Public. Make sure to read them if you want to survive the Dashboard Week.