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You and I sift through a lot of data for our jobs. Data about website performance, sales performance, product adoption, customer service, marketing campaign results … the list goes on. 

When you manage multiple content assets, such as social media or a blog, with multiple sources of data, it can get overwhelming. What should you be tracking? What actually matters? How do you visualize and analyze the data so you can extract insights and actionable information? 

More importantly, how can you make reporting more efficient when you’re busy working on multiple projects at once?

One of the struggles that slows down my own reporting and analysis is understanding what type of chart to use — and why. That’s because choosing the wrong type of chart or simply defaulting to the most common type of visualization could cause confusion with the viewer or lead to mistaken data interpretation. 

Consider this chart from The New York Times‘ project on where people born in a state move to. It visualizes a large amount of data accumulated during more than 100 years. Yet, it is easy to understand, and it clearly highlights interesting trends.

To create charts that clarify and provide the right canvas for analysis, you should first understand the reasons why you might need a chart. In this post, I’ll cover five questions to ask yourself when choosing a chart for your data. Then, I’ll give an overview of 13 different types of charts you have at your disposal.

5 Questions to Ask When Deciding Which Chart to Use

1) Do you want to compare values?

Charts are perfect for comparing one or many value sets, and they can easily show the low and high values in the data sets. To create a comparison chart, use these types of graphs:

• Column
• Bar
• Circular Area 
• Line 
• Scatter Plot
• Bullet

2) Do you want to show the composition of something?

Use this type of chart to show how individual parts make up the whole of something, such as the device type used for mobile visitors to your website or total sales broken down by sales rep. 

To show composition, use these charts:

• Pie
• Stacked Bar
• Stacked Column
• Area
• Waterfall

3) Do you want to understand the distribution of your data?

Distribution charts help you to understand outliers, the normal tendency, and the range of information in your values.

Use these charts to show distribution:

• Scatter Plot
• Line
• Column
• Bar

4) Are you interested in analyzing trends in your data set?

If you want to know more information about how a data set performed during a specific time period, there are specific chart types that do extremely well.

You should choose a:

• Line
• Dual-Axis Line
• Column

5) Do you want to better understand the relationship between value sets?

Relationship charts are suited to showing how one variable relates to one or numerous different variables. You could use this to show how something positively effects, has no effect, or negatively effects another variable.

When trying to establish the relationship between things, use these charts:

• Scatter Plot
• Bubble
• Line

13 Different Types of Charts for Analyzing & Presenting Data

To better understand each chart and how they can be used, here’s an overview of each type of chart.

1) Column

A column chart is used to show a comparison among different items, or it can show a comparison of items over time. You could use this format to see the revenue per landing page or customers by close date. 

Design Best Practices for Column Charts:

• Use consistent colors throughout the chart, selecting accent colors to highlight meaningful data points or changes over time.
• Use horizontal labels to improve readability.
• Start the y-axis at 0 to appropriately reflect the values in your graph.

2) Bar

A bar chart, basically a horizontal column chart, should be used to avoid clutter when one data label is long or if you have more than 10 items to compare. This type of visualization can also be used to display negative numbers.

Design Best Practices for Bar Charts:

• Use consistent colors throughout the chart, selecting accent colors to highlight meaningful data points or changes over time.
• Use horizontal labels to improve readability.
• Start the y-axis at 0 to appropriately reflect the values in your graph.

3) Line

A line chart reveals trends or progress over time and can be used to show many different categories of data. You should use it when you chart a continuous data set.

Design Best Practices for Line Charts:

• Use solid lines only.
• Don’t plot more than four lines to avoid visual distractions.
• Use the right height so the lines take up roughly 2/3 of the y-axis’ height.

4) Dual Axis 

A dual axis chart allows you to plot data using two y-axes and a shared x-axis. It’s used with three data sets, one of which is based on a continuous set of data and another which is better suited to being grouped by category. This should be used to visualize a correlation or the lack thereof between these three data sets. 

Design Best Practices for Dual Axis Charts:

• Use the y-axis on the left side for the primary variable because brains are naturally inclined to look left first.
• Use different graphing styles to illustrate the two data sets, as illustrated above.
• Choose contrasting colors for the two data sets.

5) Area

An area chart is basically a line chart, but the space between the x-axis and the line is filled with a color or pattern. It is useful for showing part-to-whole relations, such as showing individual sales reps’ contribution to total sales for a year. It helps you analyze both overall and individual trend information. 

Design Best Practices for Area Charts:

• Use transparent colors so information isn’t obscured in the background.
• Don’t display more than four categories to avoid clutter.
• Organize highly variable data at the top of the chart to make it easy to read.

6) Stacked Bar

This should be used to compare many different items and show the composition of each item being compared. 

Design Best Practices for Stacked Bar Charts:

• Best used to illustrate part-to-whole relationships.
• Use contrasting colors for greater clarity.
• Make chart scale large enough to view group sizes in relation to one another.

7) Pie

A pie chart shows a static number and how categories represent part of a whole — the composition of something. A pie chart represents numbers in percentages, and the total sum of all segments needs to equal 100%. 

Design Best Practices for Pie Charts:

• Don’t illustrate too many categories to ensure differentiation between slices.
• Ensure that the slice values add up to 100%.
• Order slices according to their size.

8) Scatter Plot

A scatter chart will show the relationship between two different variables or it can reveal the distribution trends. It should be used when there are many different data points, and you want to highlight similarities in the data set. This is useful when looking for outliers or for understanding the distribution of your data. 

Design Best Practices for Scatter Plots:

• Include more variables, such as different sizes, to incorporate more data.
• Start y-axis at 0 to represent data accurately.
• If you use trend lines, only use a maximum of two to make your plot easy to understand.

9) Bubble

A bubble chart is similar to a scatter plot in that it can show distribution or relationship. There is a third data set, which is indicated by the size of the bubble or circle. 

Design Best Practices for Bubble Charts:

• Scale bubbles according to area, not diameter.
• Make sure labels are clear and visible.
• Use circular shapes only.

10) Waterfall

A waterfall chart should be used to show how an initial value is affected by intermediate values — either positive or negative — and resulted in a final value. This should be used to reveal the composition of a number. An example of this would be to showcase how overall company revenue is influenced by different departments and leads to a specific profit number. 

Chart via Baans Consulting

Design Best Practices for Waterfall Charts:

• Use contrasting colors to highlight differences in data sets.
• Choose warm colors to indicate increases and cool colors to indicate decreases.

11) Funnel

A funnel chart shows a series of steps and the completion rate for each step. This can be used to track the sales process or the conversion rate across a series of pages or steps.

Design Best Practices for Funnel Charts:

• Scale the size of each section to accurately reflect the size of the data set.
• Use contrasting colors or one color in gradating hues, from darkest to lightest as the size of the funnel decreases.

12) Bullet

A bullet graph reveals progress toward a goal, compares this to another measure, and provides context in the form of a rating or performance.

Design Best Practices for Bullet Graphs:

• Use contrasting colors to highlight how the data is progressing.
• Use one color in different shades to gauge progress.

13) Heat Map

A heat map shows the relationship between two items and provides rating information, such as high to low or poor to excellent. The rating information is displayed using varying colors or saturation.  

Design Best Practices for Heat Map:

• Use a basic and clear map outline to avoid distracting from the data.
• Use a single color in varying shades to show changes in data.
• Avoid using multiple patterns.

What tips do you have for visualizing data? Check out our ebook on how to use data to win over your audience, and share your tips in the comments below!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2015 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

 
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While intended to make life easier, sometimes putting together a to-do list can feel like a bigger undertaking than accomplishing the actual tasks at hand. This concept is referred to as the procrastination “doom loop” — a cycle of putting off tasks, feeling anxiety and guilt, and consequently working with lower productivity and efficiency due to these negative feelings.

This is especially true when it comes to long-term projects, as it can be easy to lose focus and diligence when working toward monthly or quarterly deadlines. But when you’re forced to work as your own project manager, organization is the name of the game. 

8 Time Management Tips to Help You Hit Your Long-Term Deadlines

1) Set short-term SMART goals to benchmark your success, and don’t be afraid to adjust them.

If your long-term goal is months away, and the final product is the completion of a large project, such as an ebook publication or new product launch, short-term benchmarks for success will keep you on track and help you stay motivated and productive throughout the process.

We recommend setting SMART goals, which stands for:

Specific

Ensure that your short-term goals are as specific as your final goal. For example, instead of “work on ebook every day for three months,” set a specific goal to complete a certain amount of pages each week. Specific goals are easier to track and report on and more difficult to de-prioritize.

Measurable

Trackable goals allow you to measure your progress toward your final goal and report on your successes and challenges. If your long-term goal is to launch a social media campaign, a measurable short-term goal would be “secure one press mention per week” in lieu of “spread campaign awareness.”

Attainable

According to Harvard Business Review, being challenged is motivating, but working towards goals that you can’t reach is not. Establish goals that you can work to achieve and not be discouraged by. For example, it may not be attainable for your branded hashtag to start #trending on Twitter. Instead, you could aim to get a thought leader in your space to tweet using your hashtag to generate awareness on social media.

Realistic

When you’re strategizing for a big project, plan for the unexpected in the same way that you plan for success. Don’t be dishonest with yourself or your team about your daily productivity potential or how long different processes could take working toward the final goal. With eight hours in a typical workday, make sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew.

Time-Bound

Set mini-deadlines for yourself throughout the project timeline to give you a rough outline of what metrics you should be hitting each week. This approach helps break up your larger project into more achievable sections to prioritize. Balance your deadlines to provide you with motivation and some urgency, but if the deadline is too high-pressure and unrealistic, your creativity and productivity could actually diminish, based on results from a Harvard Business School study.

The key to setting these shorter-term benchmarks is flexibility, according to psychologist Tamar Chansky. Throughout your process, ensure that you are checking to ensure that these smaller goals are staying SMART — with emphasis on “realistic.”

If you’re falling behind on a deadline or a process is proving more challenging than anticipated, adjust your measures of success to stay on-track.

2) Create a reverse to-do list for your projects.

When working on a deadline that is a month or more away, my favorite strategy for project management is a reverse to-do list, which I create by starting with my final, long-term deadline, then working backwards by building in milestones to complete during the process. 

Here’s an example of how I might use this approach when planning for an ebook launch:

It’s important to keep updating the deadlines and timeframes as your project evolves to account for any delays or unanticipated challenges to keep yourself on track.

Another key for making this a successful tool is building buffer time into your mini-deadlines to account for those delays. Even if it doesn’t normally take you a full week to incorporate edits, building extra days into each mini-deadline will ensure that your final deadline isn’t delayed by obstacles earlier in the process.

These mini-deadlines help promote prioritization of important tasks and prevent burnout, according to Harvard Business Review.

3) Create accountability for yourself.

You may be responsible for keeping track of your progress toward achieving your goal, and holding yourself accountable to the timelines and benchmarks you’ve established will help you stay motivated and positive at work.

Personal accountability leads to increased feelings of workplace satisfaction, creativity, and innovation, and there are a few ways to promote that while working on your long-term project, including:

• Sharing progress toward goals with others. For some people, being vocal about your goals and progress can make a huge difference. For example, one study found that participants in weight-loss programs are more motivated and likely to succeed if they share progress photos on social media. 
• Setting up a personal reward system for each benchmark you achieve on the path to project completion. Our brains are wired to be more productive the more we achieve goals and reward ourselves, so be sure to keep progress benchmarks short-term and realistic.
• Tracking your progress so you can visualize what portion of your project you’ve successfully completed. Measuring progress helps you to evaluate your weaknesses, celebrate your strengths, and see the bigger picture of how your project is unfolding.
• Being honest with yourself and your colleagues about your achievements. If you’re transparent about what you are (or aren’t) able to achieve in a given timeframe, your experience will inform future strategy for long-term projects. This may take the shape of an informal conversation or an official performance review; in any case, be positive, focus on your achievements, and maintaining a growth mindset about your weaknesses to continually identify ways to improve and continue to excel.

4) Use a responsive to-do list.

If you’re working on a deadline that’s months away, flexibility is a must. You’ll need to be able to multitask, re-prioritize, and press pause on one piece of your project to focus on another depending on your organization’s needs. Responsive to-do lists and organizational tools are helpful ways to keep track of the various elements of a long-term project and to track daily, weekly, and monthly priorities all in one place. Check out tools that allow you to customize different types of lists, such as:

• Asana allows teams to create collaborative to-do lists and project management lists (Free for up to 15 users; Premium available for $8.33/member/month)
• Trello allows users to customize the names of their to-do lists, share them among their team members, and assign them to different people using due dates (Free for Basic; $9.99/user/month for Business Class; $20.83/user/year for Enterprise)
• todoist allows users to share unlimited tasks with colleagues and edit to-do lists offline (Free for Basic; $29/year for Premium)
• Google Keep is a digital sticky-note system that syncs to Google Drive (Free)

5) Create a schedule where you can be most productive.

Adam Rogers suggests finding your “biological prime time,” as coined by Sam Carpenter, author of Work the System, as key to becoming a more productive writer. This time can vary from person to person, but according to the Harvard Business Review, many traditional work schedules go against our natural circadian sleep rhythms that determine our peak and low energy levels.

Researcher Christopher Barnes learned that workers typically approach peak productivity around 12 p.m. and experience a sharp decline at roughly 3 p.m.. Towards the end of the afternoon, energy starts to return again, with another peak around 6 p.m..

The lesson here? Plan your most important tasks around these energy peaks, and your least important tasks around these lows. Barnes notes that this is not typical of many workers, who spend their mornings responding to emails and completing other administrative tasks, but who don’t start tackling bigger challenges requiring high levels of productivity until they have already missed their 12 p.m. peak and begun approaching the 3 p.m. slump.

Try to create a daily schedule that allows you to get the most out of your high-energy times, and if it operates contrary to the rest of your organization, communicate that with your supervisor.

In the example calendar below, events requiring higher levels of productivity and cognitive thought, such as meetings, presentations, and writing, are scheduled around peak productivity times. In contrast, answering emails and eating lunch are scheduled near productivity dips because, unless the emails are time-sensitive, these to-dos aren’t typically top-priority and can be scheduled around bigger tasks. 

This isn’t an exact science, so finding your ideal schedule may require some testing to determine when you’re most efficient and when you hit that afternoon slump.

6) Ask for help when you need it.

This is necessary advice for anyone working on a team, as using resources around you is integral to most workplace success, according to Fortune. If you’re being tripped up by an obstacle, are experiencing a production delay, or simply have writer’s block that could throw a wrench in your timeline, and you should use resources around you for guidance and assistance.

This is particularly essential if your deadlines are for finished products months in advance. Missing one internal mini-deadline probably won’t be an insurmountable issue, but if you’re consistently falling behind on benchmarks towards the final goal, staying silent and trying to fix the problem yourself could result in a missed deadline.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to peers or managers for help with brainstorming, editing, or any other roadblock you might be encountering. They would rather you reached out for help before missing a deadline than after missing a deadline, and remember: the most successful people ask for help.

Lean on resources around you to make your life easier and your project better, but remember to be a good coworker, too. When you’re asking for help:

• Outline your SMART goals so your colleagues understand your project.
• Provide them with resources, such as project specs or prior drafts, to make it easier to help you. 
• Be specific about what you’re asking for and when your deadlines are.
• Say thank you! Acknowledge their above-and-beyond efforts by letting their supervisor know how they collaborated with you and offering to return the favor with one of their projects.
• Offer help to colleagues on a regular basis, not just when you need help, to cultivate good faith in your workplace so you’re a person people want to help again in the future.

7) Commit to work-life balance.

When your project requires months of hard work, it might feel difficult to step away from your desk or computer at the end of each day with so much left to complete. However, you shouldn’t give in to the temptation of workaholism.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, working long (more than 50) hours can negatively impact your levels of productivity, innovation, and efficiency.

Even if you can’t turn in your final product right away, you shouldn’t stay at work burning the midnight oil trying to get it done early. You’ll work more efficiently by setting daily priorities that allow you to step away from work and recharge once you’ve completed them.

8) Analyze and report on successes and challenges of projects for future goal-setting.

Once you’ve successfully completed a long-term project, don’t move on to the next one without first reflecting on your strategies for project management. What went well, and perhaps more importantly, what didn’t?

If your work is primarily comprised of long-term projects, you will need to continually refine and improve your approach to be as efficient as possible. Document your processes and share them with your team so they can learn from your triumphs and struggles for their projects as well.

Just because your deadline is months away doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t start planning and strategizing for it today. Once you’re ready to dive into a project, learn more about strategies for successful, and not overwhelming, priority-setting and project management.

What are your tips and tricks for project management strategies? Share with us in the comments below!

Employees are the lifeblood of the agency business, and maintaining a productive and engaged workforce is one of the most challenging aspects of running an agency. But it can be hard for owners to understand the attitudes and goals of an increasingly diverse workforce, and employees may find it difficult to give honest feedback anonymously.

To find out how the attitudes of agency employees shape their goals and opinions about agency work, HubSpot is partnering in a new Agency Employee Attitudes Survey.

The survey is anonymous, and should take less than 15 minutes to complete. Respondents who participate by September 15th can enter to win a $250 Amazon.com gift card.

TAKE THE AGENCY EMPLOYEE SURVEY

The results of this study will be presented at INBOUND 2016 in November.

The Agency Employee Attitudes Survey explores topics such as:

• How do agency employees view the importance of work, play, and balancing the two?
• What expectations do they have from their agency employers, and how do they view their own responsibilities?
• How do they compare the pros and cons of working in an agency versus in a client-side organization?
• How did they first choose to work in an agency, and how likely would they be to recommend an agency career to others?
• Which features and benefits of an agency career are most important to them?
• Do millennial employees actually feel differently about work than other age groups?
• How can agency owners better understand their employees and offer them features and benefits they will value?

All participants can get free access to the results, which will be shared for the first time at HubSpot’s INBOUND Conference in November 2016.