[OC] I set my alarm at the same early time "just in case" for years. So I let traffic decide my alarm for a month to see how much sleep I was losing. Visualization

What This Visualization Shows

This data visualization displays "[OC] I set my alarm at the same early time "just in case" for years. So I let traffic decide my alarm for a month to see how much sleep I was losing." and provides a clear visual representation of the underlying data patterns and trends. The visualization focuses on I drive just over an hour to work and have to be there at 9am. So I always had my alarm set for 6:45am just to make sure I'd get there on time if traffic was ever bad.

I got curious about how much sleep I was losing by waking up for a worst case scenario every day, so I spent July letting live traffic data set my alarm time instead. Every morning I made it so I'd have exactly 1 hour to get ready to arrive at 9am.

Average was 6:57, twelve minutes past where I'd been setting it. Over the month that's 4 hours 24 minutes of sleep I'd been throwing away.

What surprised me is how small the variance was. Just based on how things feel on those bad traffic days I expected wild swings; but the whole month fit in a 9 minute window, 6:53 to 7:02. The worst traffic of the month still let me sleep 8 minutes past my old alarm. My commute isn't really riddled with traffic problems so the swings weren't very big, but I'm curious how big these changes would be for people with jobs in big cities that have to deal with interstate/highway traffic more.

Data: my own alarm history, Google Directions data via Google's API. 22 weekdays, Jul 3 excluded (holiday). Tool is an Android app I built to adjust my alarm time every morning automatically while I was still asleep (can link if requested), which allows us to understand complex relationships and insights within the data through visual storytelling.

Deep Dive into the Topic

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