Social distancing has affected all of us, in different ways and at different times. I started working from home in mid/late-March and will be doing so for the foreseeable future. I was interested in seeing how this new way of life showed up in some of my personal data, so naturally that led to an analysis. The following charts show trends in my personal data from early March through early June, with the red dotted line indicating when I started working from home.

One of the most stark changes during social distancing has been my lack of movement. Working longer hours + lack of social activities has led to a dramatic decrease in my daily steps. This chart shows a drop in steps after I started social distancing followed by a period of time where I didn’t even make an effort to go outside. I’ve made it a priority over the past two months to get outside for walks. I don’t manage to get outside every day (as seen by the step fluctuations), but I’m a lot better off than I was earlier on during social distancing. Going on walks has been a great opportunity for me to get away from my desk and catch up with friends and family.

Along with a decrease in my activity, I’ve also seen a change in my sleep schedule. Staying up late finishing work assignments + not having to commute to work has pushed my bed time further into the early morning. This chart shows the trend in when I went to bed, as represented in minutes before or after 12:30AM, which was my average bed time in 2019. An interesting thing to note is that my sleep schedule may be normalizing thanks to my job recently needing me to go into the office every other week.

I’ve been staying up later and getting up later, so one would think that I’m getting about the same amount of sleep. Well, that’s not borne out in the data. This chart shows my nightly sleep total as minutes above or below my average in 2019, 7 hours and 20 minutes. I’ve also included my 2019 averages for weekends vs weeknights, for reference. There are some extreme negative bars throughout this period, even including some weekend nights. While my workload has leveled off recently, I’m now on occasional early morning shifts, and that’s probably a key factor in the more recent negative bars.

The amount of time I spend on my phone is a great indicator of how active/social I’m being as well as my overall mood. I think screen time has gone up for most people during this stretch; with lower in-person social interaction, I think that’s totally understandable. But my screen time sure did spike in early April. In recent weeks though, it seems things have leveled off to a new normal that’s near pre-COVID levels.

My goal for 2020 was to keep my screen time down to an average of 3 hours per day, mainly by only using it for checking Twitter and messaging friends. The chart below shows the breakdown of my screen time spent social networking (let’s be real, that’s mainly Twitter), on productivity apps (outlook, gmail, notes, etc.), playing games, and other(like talking on the phone.) One thing I’ve learned about myself through nearly two years of tracking my screen time is that when I’m playing a lot of games on my phone, things aren’t going too great. So anyway, check out this chart!

There was a truly rough period where I played games for longer than I was on Twitter (shudder), but it’s nice to see the percent of time spent on games has reduced dramatically in recent weeks. Similarly, my phone notifications have gone up. This is an imperfect measure because I only have certain notifications turned on, but I think this chart is still illuminating. If taken as a proxy for messaging and interacting with friends, there was a period of decline in notifications followed by a leveling off to pre-COVID levels of late.