You can claim anything if you have data. So post break up in the valentines week of Feb 2015, I decided to analyze how my behaviour pattern changes as I go through tough times and heal ( though it seemed like a tall order at that point). So I decided to run an experiment on myself. I spend a major time connected to the social network, so there should be a direct response of the turmoil in my heart on the things I post on Facebook. I needed the data to prove it. I set up an IFTTT tracker on my facebook account, so whatever I posted got logged in a separate location with Date and Time of the post, along with what I posted (only unicode text sections). That tracker has been running for close to 170 days now. So I wanted to checkout how I fared, for better or worse. Scripts done, time to Analyze.



First lesson learnt: When setting up logs for later analysis, always make sure the Date and times are easily retrievable from the mangled mass of data. Had to spend some 2 hours to extract the data to a clean form that can be directly parsed to visualization tools that I have access to in R. Let's get started with some word clouds.

The last two weeks of February, reflects the overcompensation of being busy in work.

March was an overall timeline of mundane depression.

April, I was indeed getting better. But lingering sense of longing persisted.

May, was a whirlwind time of fighting off old habits. Broke out of all depressions. Definitely generated much chatter on Salman Khan.

June, now I was definitely generating random chatter. Batting for India over cricket related battles with other countries.

July was a month of feeling awesome. Completed an year at Zendrive. Looks like, I am trusting people again.

It's August now..

If we look at the simple count of posts I did we can see this:

May and June have significantly more posts than previous three months combined. So May was officially the end of depression. Thanks to the office outing of adventure sports.That was some awesome morale boost. Also there is an apparent drop in number of posts I make to Facebook because of the productivity plugin I use. I am definitely wasting less time on Facebook.





March-April-May had significant number of all nighters pulled per month than June-July-August. The vertical lines correspond to 5 o clock morning, 1 & 2 o clock afternoon, 8 & 10 o clock night from left to right (time is in 24 hours format).That 8-9 o clock night is generally the time we leave from office so there is always a thing like, let's post something before leaving. Most of the post during office hours are shares of music, that's listened to while coding. But one thing is also visible that I am making a conscious effort of bringing the life into a routine, no more all-nighters unless absolutely necessary. It would be also interesting to note what is my most busiest time from my posts on Facebook over the course of last 5 months.

Yes it's 8-9 o'clock onwards. Overall average solid sleep time is 3 hours between 4-8 in the morning (nice, but now it has increased as seen earlier here it's obscured because of the long observation window.)

My activity increases on Fb roughly in bursts of 5-7 days. (bursts of creativity probably)



By the way of conclusion, I am definitely bringing about positive changes to my self, and I can safely say I am past the boundaries of depression post break up. However I'll keep the trackers on to track myself again after 6 months.



Ps: R with packages tm, wordcloud,ggplot2 were used for this exercise along with IFTTT for creating the necessary logs. My profession calls for a lot of sifting through data to make the world a better place, why not use it for some self-introspection. Hence some recreational data-analysis