Today was day three of the Dashboard Week and it is the last week as Data Schooler. Lena gave us a very cool topic: The Gender Pay Gap (https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/viewing/download). I was very happy to work with the data – till the problems began. So, this post is about calm down and create a plan B while you are in a stressed situation.

First, I prepared the data. The problem came very quick, because I didn’t exactly know what I wanted to create and which information I wanted to show with my visualisation. So, I had so many extra times just for changing workflows trying to build something in Tableau. I wanted to show a new chart I just ‘learned’ a day before, I wanted to create a map (what was very time intensive, because we had to type in all the Longitudes and Latitudes for the different postal codes) and I wanted to create a shape filled chart, that I only once saw and never had done before.

While everything what I tried to do went wrong, I had also stopped working on the postal codes by looking at the time. I was very stressed and nervous to have an empty dashboard in the end and won’t be able to present anything.

So, what I’ve done is focus on a single simple question and worked out what has a relationship to that. So, I was able to focus on the visualisation of more basic charts, but still had time to give it a nice look. I think I made the decision to do that at the right time. None of what I thought about could be nice presented with absolutely no design and formatting time.

My advice to you (and yes, I knew it before, but sometimes things happen that you can’t explain :D)

▷ Think about what question(s) you want to answer

▷ Think about how you want to visualize the information you want to present

▷ Work on the data structure you need for that

◈◇ If everything is (or you are) going crazy ↠ focus on a basic question of your interest and try to ignore the fancy thoughts, that tell you that you must present the first idea that came to your mind and nothing else

◈◇ Stay calm 😉 and trust in the skills you already have

If you want to see what I made out of this situation you can watch it here.