The Year in (Personal) Data: 2024

Welcome to the first post on the StatsDr blog! I plan to use this space to talk about various statistics topics, especially for use in teaching. That said, I'll also use it for an annual post about some personal data, following a bit in my wife's footsteps with her annual posts about the books she read that year. To that end, let's start with:

Books

This year, I read 22 books, falling slightly short of my goal of 24. It was an unusual assortment of genres for me this year, with more memoirs than I would have expected. 10 books were fiction, 12 non-fiction. The longest fiction (by far, at 31 hours) was 11/22/63 by Stephen King while the longest non-fiction (by far, at 27 hours) was American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Exactly one book was a re-read, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis.

This is the most I've read in a while, with previous years coming in at:

• 2023: 14 books read, goal was 10
• 2022: 11 books read, goal was 20
• 2021: 17 books read, goal was 20
• 2020: 4 books read, goal was 20
• 2019: 13 books read, goal was 20 (incidentally, when I read The Big Short)
• 2018: 10 books read, goal was 10

In addition to Michael Lewis, this year's authors I've read before included: Dave Eggers, Terry Pratchett, and Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Melody's awards for 2024 can be found here. Out of the 74 books she read, only 5 were ones we both read this year.

For a deep-dive on the books I read this year, you can find that on the blog here.

The Library

Keeping in the literary theme, my wife and I have a library of over 1000 works in our library (current count is 1183). We've been cataloging these works for a while now and have some data on them (shoutout to Librarika!).

Acquisitions

We added 43 books to the library this year. Because I'm a statistician and care about such things, there is a bit of lag on this figure – some recently-acquired books have yet to make it into the database, while others acquired in 2023 were not added until 2024. In lieu of a soliloquy on messy data, let's stay focused on the library.

As may be expected, these books are varied. From The Unofficial Holy Bible for Minecrafters and The Day the World Came to Town (the basis of the Broadway musical Come from Away) to The Chicago Manual of Style (a fantastic find for sale at the library in Cloudcroft, NM) and The Every (Dave Eggers' sequel to The Circle).

Members + Circulations

We added a new member to the library (welcome, Jane!), bringing us to 13 (15 if you count me and my wife). As far as I can tell, there were 2 books checked out this year, bringing us to 12 books currently in circulation. The oldest circulation has been checked out since at least August 2022, while the most recent was in October 2024.

Goals

In addition to the reading goal of 24 books (missed it by that much), I had some annual goals for 2024 and am pretty pleased with the results overall.

Walking Goal: 500 miles

I'll give you 1 guess as to how I decided to "proclaim" this goal. I'm pleased to report that I walked ~612.2 miles this year!

I started the year by using my watch to track my steps (an aging Fossil hybrid smartwatch), but found that I wasn't always wearing it, so I switched to using my phone's built-in pedometer, assuming 2640 steps per mile (honestly, I can't remember how I estimated that). Not the cleanest data collection, but enough for my purposes.

Some interesting features:

• Generally, I walked a lot more during the Fall semester, largely due to teaching in-person, though reinstalling Pokémon GO certainly contributed
• The spike in mid-August is due to a trip to Cloudcroft, NM, which included a lot of hiking, including at White Sands National Park (yes, it's a National Park as of 2019, though some signs still say National Monument)

• The spike in mid-September is from a single event, helping our friend Wes beta-test a hide-and-seek game in the Domain, resulting in over 16,000 steps in a single day (by no means a personal best, but I believe it was the year's record).

The Goal to Reduce Phone Screen Time

This was multifaceted, but generally focused on setting some better boundaries with the magic glowing rectangle that lives in my pocket (the magic glowing rectangle that lives on my desk hasn't been as much of a problem and so I didn't set any goals for it this year). I'd let screen time get totally out of hand, so I wanted to start with some realistic goals. I planned ahead at the end of 2023 to try to observe my behavior to help determine what would be reasonable, and used a structure that was new to me but worked wonderfully to help me curtail it. To explain, I think it's best to introduce by example.

Reddit

The "front-page of the internet" was taking more of my time than I'd like. Quick dopamine hit? Totally fine. Doomscrolling? Not so much. So, I divided this goal into four categories of screen time:

• ≤ 15 min: goal was ≥ 200 days, actual was 246!
• 15 min – 30 min: goal was ≤ 75 days, actual was 76
• 30 min – 45 min: goal was ≤ 50 days, actual was 28!
• ≥ 45 min: goal was ≤ 41 days, actual was 17!!

Now, the structure should make some sense. Essentially, I wanted to increase the number of days I spend very little time on Reddit, while trying to decrease the number of days I spent a lot of time on Reddit. That said, especially given some extenuating circumstances at the beginning of 2024, I thought it best to have some "I don't care" days built in, along with these intermediate categories.

Overall, I found it much easier to back away from Reddit than I thought it would be. I do think having the categories helped -- allowing myself the freedom to say "eh, it's okay to extend the timer another 30 minutes today" made it easier to stop. I definitely plan to further reduce the Reddit time in 2025, though likely reducing the number of categories, as they weren't particularly helpful.

Some other takeaways? Android's timer for apps and websites breaks sometimes. For example, today, I set the Reddit timer for 15 minutes (so it would stop automatically), and yet, it let me stay on the page for 32 minutes. I rely on the built-in "Digital Wellbeing" features but they do break sometimes. Not sure why, seems more prevalent on website timers than app timers, though I think I've seen both.

I also definitely had some user error throughout the year, filling out my weekly summaries, noticing "oh, I want to only have 15 minutes per day for the upcoming week" but failing to update the timer, only noticing days later. It's an imperfect system, but that's why there's some slack built into it.

YouTube

Some people have football. Some have reality shows. Some have the news or Netflix. I have YouTube. I knew going into last year that this was the biggest time-suck. So, while I wanted to curtail it, I also set the most lax goals, trying to ensure that I could complete them and build some momentum, rather than crashing and burning. Turns out, that worked. Yes, I am a bit embarrassed by how much YouTube I watched, but that's exactly why it's on this list. 

• ≤ 45 min: goal was ≥ 100 days, actual was 108!
• 45 min – 1 hr 15 min: goal was ≤ 125 days, actual was 122
• 1 hr 15 min – 1 hr 45 min: goal was ≤ 100 days, actual was 98
• ≥ 1 hr 45 min: goal was ≤ 41 days, actual was 39

Again, in 2025, I plan to reduce the number of categories, reduce each category's upper limit, and try to push the distribution to a lower total screen time. But the big point for me was that I could set these goals and meet them. Turns out, having a mechanism to say "ooh, but if I get ahead on the ≤ 45 min, that means I can watch more later in the year!" was a great incentive for me. That was true across-the-board.

Instagram

You get the picture, as it were.

• ≤ 20 min: goal was ≥ 250 days, actual was 267 days!
• 20 min – 45 min: goal was ≤ 75 days, actual was 83 days
• This was largely due to the user error referenced above
• ≥ 45 min: goal was ≤ 41 days, actual was 17 days!!

Turns out, Insta was also easier to reduce than expected. It's still enough that I will have a goal for 2025 again, but that was much easier than I thought it would be.

Guitar

I set out to learn 5 classical (or classical-style) guitar pieces this year, memorizing them and playing them reasonably well. This was the biggest failure goal-wise this year, learning exactly one: Lágrima by Francisco Tárrega. I'd learned a couple just prior to 2024 and thought I could keep that momentum. Other things got in the way and I didn't prioritize it. I do hope to continue learning new pieces, but I was shockingly okay with this one. My priorities shifted for a while this year, and y'know what, that's okay.

Work

This year, I taught three sections of Elementary Statistics at Austin Community College as an adjunct associate professor. One section in the Spring (meeting on Zoom), two sections in the Fall (in-person at the Leander and Round Rock campuses).

During the Fall, I tracked my time working on the course – developing materials, grading, answering student questions, etc. On average, I worked 21.6 hours per week for a role that was ostensibly 19 hours per week.

Additionally, I am part of the Teaching and Learning Academy (TLA), taking a series of 5-week courses for continuing education and professional development by teachers for teachers to hone my craft. They've been phenomenal so far, looking at Teaching to the Brain and Building a Community of Learners. For the weeks that I worked on any TLA material, I worked an average of 3.2 hours on that per week, right in line with what was expected by the program! It's already helped me revise my course material to better serve students, and I'm excited to take the two remaining courses this Spring.

Miscellany

A collection of highlights, in no particular order. Yes, some of these aren't as data-centric.

• This year, I was honored to officiate my first wedding! 
• I got to meet R.B. Bbhoggawact (ACC's mascot) and Buc-ee!
• Saw my first total solar eclipse! If you didn't get a chance, please try to do so. Even as a science-y person, I thought "what's the big deal, it will get dark" but that is not it at all. During the ~3 minutes of totality, when it's safe to look without eclipse glasses, it felt mystical or magical. My best photo doesn't do it justice, but I could see the stars while the sun is out. You might not think that makes a big deal, but it was surreal, like something out of Doctor Who or Star Wars. It made me feel like I was on another planet, sailing the stars. 10/10, would eclipse again.

• Sticking with a space theme, I got to see Captain Malcolm Reynolds' spacesuit from Firefly and Serenity, along with an actual Tribble from Star Trek at the New Mexico Museum of Space History.
• Got to see my brother-in-law graduate with his JD from Texas Southern University and later see his wife graduate with her MSN from UT Arlington!
• Worked back-to-back Tres Dias weekends in the Spring.
• Saw my first Austin Sol game
• Got a gift from the one and only 11 Acorn Lane for being a nerd a knowledgeable fan of their discography =)
• Parking Pokémon GO numbers here for funsies, though some stats are a combination of when I first played in 2016 and now in 2024. 
• Got to a rating of ~1920 in the battle league (Dual Destiny season), winning 604 / 1179 battles in 2024, with a largest streak of 12 wins in a row.
• ~469.9 km walked. 151 eggs hatched. 3023 PokéStops visited. 246 unique PokéStops. 14 completed Routes. 
• 5648 Pokémon caught. 14 completed Collection Challenges. 354 Field Research tasks. 
• 185 Team GO Rocket members defeated. 17 species of Pokémon defeated in raids. 1 mega evolution species. 
• 0 best friends (soooo close to getting that by end of the year, but didn't quite make it). 0 best buddies (sameeee). 2 Vivillon habitats (Modern and Elegant).