Quantified self refers to the use of self-tracking methods with either physical or technological means to help you gain more insight into yourself. It has recently been made more popular by wearable technologies, such as Fitbit, which have the ability to track a multitude of personal data such as heart rate, sleeping patterns, and steps, among other things. In the past it was most commonly used in the healthcare field to help patients and doctors keep track of vital statistics to assess the health of a patient. By keeping track of personal data, we are able to identify trends and can use the data collected to make decisions that could improve our quality of life.

In this project, I chose to create a data set by keeping track of each purchase, whether in cash or credit, that I made in the week of October 17th, 2019 to October 23rd, 2019. My data set contains the date, which is the date of the purchase, the store where the purchase was made, the type of store (coffee shop, grocery store, restaurant, metro card), the item type (food, metro card), and the amount I spent on the purchase.

I chose to keep track of my spending habits so that I could actually visualize what I am spending my money on since I normally do not keep track of my spending and I thought it would be a good idea to see where I am spending the most money and determine if I needed to spend that much money.

The first visualization is a line chart that I created to show how much money I spent each day.

In the second visualization, I created a pie chart to show how much money I am spending at the types of stores I frequent. I then created a third visualization, which is a second pie chart, to show how much money I am spending on the types of items I buy. I found that even though I frequent four types of stores I am essentially buying only two types of items, food and metro cards. I spent the most money on food items by far and of that the most was spent at coffee shops.

In the fourth visualization, I created a tree map to show how much money I am spending at each store. I determined that I spent the most money at Starbucks with $29.68 being spent there in a week, followed by Metro cards at $25.50, and the Halal Cart with $18.00 to round out the top three.

In the last visualization, I created a stacked bar chart to how much I spent at each store per day. I created this visualization to determine if there were any trends in my spending.  From this visualization it seems that I spend the most on weekdays although the amount of stores I visit and the amount I spent at each store varies day by day.

Given the time, I would have liked to expand the data set to include a longer range of time to determine if there actually are any trends in my spending as well as determine what I spend the most money on in a month. Based on the pie chart and tree map, I will assume the answer will most likely be coffee.