This is my 2021 Year in Review! As always, what follows is a mix of data that I manually track as well as other personal data that I am able to get my hands on. It’s Year 2 of this pandemic and it’s definitely evident within the charts that follow. You’ll notice new data sources and different ways of representing data this year as I continue to try and improve this analysis. I hope you enjoy taking a look!

Sport Teams

We’ll start off in the world of sports. This is the least “personal” of the data I collect in the sense that I have zero control over it, but it’s still very much a part of how I look back on the year. UCLA basketball had an amazing run in March Madness and reminded me of what it’s like having a team with a chance at winning it all. Not to be outdone, the Suns made it all the way to the NBA Finals and reminded me how it feels when your hopes and dreams are dashed at the very end. The Cardinals got off to a hot start again in 2021 before fading in the second half. Hopefully they can rebound in the playoffs.

The chart below shows a time series of my teams’ performances over the years, with the verticle lines indicating a .500 record. Overall, 2021 was one of the best years for my collective rooting interests!

Sporting Events

The return to sporting events was a slow trickle in the spring, followed by a bunch of Nats games and travel in the summer and fall. In all, I went to 11 games in 5 different states across 4 sports. Defintely one of the best parts of the year.

Exercise

I wasn’t ready to jump back into the social sports scene this past year, so my exercise had to be found elsewhere. After, frankly, the least active year of my life, I made a commitment to get moving more often. I trained for the Cherry Blossm 10-Miler (September edition!) and joined a local Spikeball group. I started keeping track of when I got some exercise in, and the chart below displays my activity over the latter half of the year. July and November were heavy with travel, but otherwise I’m thrilled with how this looks.

Fitbit - Steps

Seguing to general activity, I’ve been tracking my steps with Fitbit since late 2015. Despite an increase in steps over 2020, I still fell well shy of my goal of 11,000 steps per day. My pre-pandemic life had a lot of automatic steps built in, from my commute to social sports etc, so this is no surprise. It might be hard to get back to normal levels in 2022 given my permanent work-from-home status, but I think I can improve on the 2021 number at least.
This violin chart is an interesting way of reframing the same data from the chart above. The shape of the violins relates to the density of days with that number of steps. From 2016 to 2019 the shape widens around 9,000 steps or so, with a long tail upward. This indicates a high baseline with some really active days mixed in. The shape of the last two years shows that there are many more low-step days. While 2021 looks a little better, it’s clear that the lack of a commute means I need to be more conscious of getting steps in. This last plot tracks the change in steps as the weather got better and pandemic mobility improved. The last few months look similar to my pre-2020 years!

Metro Card

This year was really leaps and bounds better in terms of in-person hangouts and social activities in general. Back when I had a commute, I would get part of my paycheck added onto my metro card each month. Unfortunately I forgot to turn this function off for a couple of months, and my balance rose to well over $500! I didn’t use the metro between April and December of 2020, so one of my 2021 goals was to chip away at this balance. I’m getting there!

Concerts

Bands started going on tour in late summer/early fall, and it was great getting back to some of my favorite venues in DC with Gina. Many of the tours were for albums put out in 2019 and 2020, so several of these shows were make-ups of concerts we already had tickets for.

Dining

A new thing that I track is where I dine out and order food from. My dining experiences were mostly delivery and take-out earlier in the year, but in-person dining made a big comeback and ended up dwarfing the take-out and delivery orders. The spikes in July and November reflect trips I took.
Each of the maps in these tabs show the locations of where I ate or ordered from this year. The country map is essentially a proxy for the trips I took: Arizona, California, Vegas, Upstate New York, Asheville, Denver, and Savannah. The DC Metro map captures the weight of restaurants in Arlington but also places around the wharf and Nats Park as well as the UCLA game watch bar. The Arlington map zooms in on the Virgina Square and Ballston Metro stops specifically. The bigger circles are the go-to’s: Shake Shack, Chick-fil-A and & Pizza, to name a few.

Country

DC Metro Area

Arlington

Screen Time

This year wasn’t all positive though. I once again aimed to decrease my screen time, and failed massively. The top chart shows that I tend to vary quite a bit in screen time throughout the year. The dotted line indicates three hours of daily screen time - I’m going to try to get my average closer to that number in 2022, I swear. The second chart shows the breakdown of my screen time by app. The green section (Social Networking) is mainly just Twitter, and it has been remarkably consistent over the past couple of years. A positive takeaway from this is the yellow section (Games) went down over the latter half of 2021. I’ve come to recognize that my mental health is in bad shape when I’m playing a lot of games on my phone, so this is a good development.

Twitter

My twitter account is a lot quieter in recent years, but that doesn’t mean I’m not using it a ton. The daily and monthly charts below are largely an indication of when I had sports tweets to send out, like when UCLA had their run to the Final Four and the Suns made their way to the NBA Finals.

Fitbit - Sleep

Twitter and otherwise scrolling on my phone is something I’d like to cut out late at night, but that has yet to happen. The lines going across the chart below refers to 8 hours of sleep. I haven’t gotten to that mark while tracking my sleep, but I wasn’t far off last year.
I added a new way of looking at my sleep data this year. These charts show my bed time (indexed to midnight), and wake time (indexed to 8am) over the years. There have been some massive changes the past couple years. My bed time, both on weeknights and weekends, has gone way past midnight. With my work-from-home status, I’ve been getting up right before work starts at 9am, and my weekend wakeup time has crept past 10am. While I love to sleep in, I think a more consistent sleep schedule will be a goal in 2022.

Shows Watched

I started keeping track of all my shows in 2020, because I really didn’t have anything better to do. The top chart shows a steady build-up of “active” shows over the years as I fell behind on some shows. I fixed that in 2020, started and finished a handful of shows in 2021, and head into 2022 with a healthy number of shows to keep up with.
These next two charts were put together with the help of IMDb data. Most of the shows that I watched in 2021 began between 2015-2019, while there are some long-running shows I continue to watch, like South Park and Curb Your Enthusiasm. The bottom chart utilizes IMDb’s genre tags. Comedy and drama led the way in 2021, which checks out.

Movies Watched

I logged all the movies I watched in 2020, thinking I’d eventually look back on that strange pandemic year and wonder how I passed the time. I decided to keep the log going, and even tried to recall every movie I’ve ever seen (that will be a future analysis). I once again utilized IMDb’s data to help summarize the movies I watched in 2021. Despite returning to the theater for some movies this year, my most-watched time period was 2010-2019. A lot of this can be attributed to the fact that we’re only 2 years into the latest time block though. Similar to the tree map for shows, comedy and drama led the way in 2021.

Goodreads

The upward trend of books read continued in 2021, as my local library kept me fully stocked all year long. I hit my goal of 60 books read this year, which added up to over 20,000 pages read. The second chart in this section shows a breakdown of the genre of books I read this year vs last. The dark blue circles are this year’s counts, while the light blue are for 2020. Historical fiction remains one of my favorite genres. I read more biographies, sports, and mysteries in 2021, while I didn’t read quite as many sci-fi and history books. Some of my favorite books from this year are: The Midnight Library, The Anthropocene Reviewed, Project Hail Mary, Hour of the Witch, Squeeze Me,Beneath A Scarlet Sky, and the Broken Earth series.

Guitar

One of the best things to come out of 2021 was taking guitar lessons. Gina and I signed up for lessons in August and continue to go once a week. The chart below shows the days where I practiced guitar for at least 15 minutes. It can be tough at times to fit some playing time in, especially when busy with work, travel, or other activities that take up our evenings/weekends. Despite the challenge of learning an instrument and finding time to practice, I’m really enjoying it and starting to see some noticeable progress in my abilities. My goal is to stick with this through 2022 and see a lot more green days than orange.