: First, diagnosing the reasons why it's confusing: Your different messages are competing with each other. First the viewer notices that Week 1 was much more productive than Week 2 - this is

@Kaufman565

First, diagnosing the reasons why it's confusing:


Your different messages are competing with each other. First the viewer notices that Week 1 was much more productive than Week 2 - this is the most eye-catching message. Then they realise this isn't very meaningful, since there were more days in week 1 than week 2.
Then they look at individual days, and the ordering gets confusing. Most "over time" data graphics have days evenly spaced and in order. Here, you need to look several colours up on the key before you figure out that days mostly go top to bottom, and then it's confusing that week 2 seems different (Saturday, Sunday, Friday? Why do the weeks start at different days?)
Then there's the high amount of eye-bouncing between the key and the chart to check any particular day.




So probably, in the ideal solution, it'll be:


easy and intuitive to follow progress over time,
easy to spot days which are productive and days which are less so
easy to see in which weeks the bulk of the work was done, without this being too distorted by days that haven't happened yet or days when no work would be done for some reason




A really good technique for cases with lots of mini-sets of fairly simple data is a grid of small charts all on the same scale. This is sometimes called "small multiples". Each one works independently, and you can easily scan over the whole set to see patterns and overall trends.

Here's a very simple quick example (needs a title) where you can quickly see:


They increased their work rate in the last two weeks of the project,
They start most weeks well then lose focus before working hard to catch up on Friday
They were away for much of Week 4 but worked hard on the weekend to catch up




I'd favour filled areas to lines for this so you can get an easy, intuitive grasp of the volume done each week.

Columns also work - slightly clearer and easier to look up specific days, but has slightly less of an intuitive sense of volume and direction, and looks busier at first glance.

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