Graph it!

I have had a long love affair with the Cartesian plane, dating back to school days when they were first scribbled on the board by enthusiastic Maths teachers. I just love the visual depiction of how y varies as x changes – so… tangible.

Anyhow, I decided these useful things could be applied to many things outside the Maths classroom, and the first “useful” task I assigned them to was tracking my improvement in practising scales for the piano. Every week, the metronome speed would go up, with a corresponding decrease in total time taken to practise 40-odd scales twice through. My piano teacher was totally fascinated with the graphs, so much so that she overlooked the fact that I wasn’t practising them sufficiently at each speed to make me proficient at them – it was all about the steep downward slope, you understand.

Well, more recently, I decided I’d track my blog’s audience to see how many people had come across it before (the average daily readership of the blog is not doing anything exciting, the graph would be approximately a straight horizontal line over time), by monitoring how many times my blog profile has been read over time.

The results are thus:



While the graph looks pretty impressive, I have to give credit to Peas for my increasing publicity; after her winning 2 blog awards and sky-rocketing to blog fame, the fact that I am advertised as her “Itye flatmate” resulted in more hits for me, and in fact would have brought all of you current readers here in the first place (thanks Peas).

Even more recently than that, I decided this month to monitor my monthly expenditure, which gave me quite a shock, not ever having been the kind of person to budget herself. Well, R11,000 later, I realised I spend a lot more than the R8,000 I guessed I spent monthly on average. Thankfully I didn’t try this experiment out in December, I know I would have had a heart attack. Importantly, I tried not to allow my expenditure tracking to influence my spending, I just wanted to see how much I spent – whether I decide I need to cut expenses in some department is a decision to take after a few months’ tracking – after all, there could be some exceptions that pop up from month to month.

The breakdown of the expenditure items was:



Two out of the top three expense categories (rent, clothes, entertainment) are things that I guess could be curbed if I ever felt the need to decrease my expenditure, but in reality I find both rather essential… at least the dentist isn’t something that happens every month! The other thing that surprised me was the fact that petrol came in at only 6% of expenses. We whinge about the price going up all the time, but I guess to the average person living well above the breadline (and travelling regular city distances), price increases hardly make a dent on your direct expenditure.

If a car is in fact in my near future, it will become the largest single monthly expense, substantially more than rent. Food for thought.

The main challenge now is to decide what to track next – any ideas?