It was my fault, really. I don’t like flying, and I don’t sleep well in planes, but I still booked a 28-hour flight from Manila to New York. I honestly thought I was ready for it. I had melatonin pills, a neck pillow, a sleep mask, a blanket, and a pair of socks. Knocking myself out was my number one goal. That, I thought, was how I would survive this flight. While I did manage to fall asleep, I kept on waking up because some part of me would start to get sore from being confined in a chair for so long.

The first part of the round trip flight was actually a pretty good deal. For $800, I was able to go to Germany (stayed for 12 hours) and to Singapore (stayed for 5 days) before finally flying out to the Philippines. I got to visit countries that I’ve never been to before, and I also got to spend time with friends that I haven’t seen in a long time.

The coming back part, unfortunately, meant that I have to go from Manila to Singapore, Singapore to Germany, then Germany to New York. It was an unnecessarily long trip, and because I kept on waking up, I thought I’d do something fun instead. Like maybe log the activities that I did in the flight.

It’s unfortunately not the most accurate data because some activities overlap like eating while watching a movie. I also didn’t have the foresight to jot down the time when I would stop doing something, e.g., I would log the time when I started eating but not when I finished. But even then, I think the logs were still good enough to learn from.

I didn’t know how to represent the data at first. I wanted something more creative and outside of the usual charts that I’ve made before. But the other day, I ran into a Sketch plugin that created spirals. So I thought that maybe I could represent the data as a snail because of how unbearably long the flight was.

So after a couple hours of trial and error with both the 6Spiral and Looper plugins, I came up with a shell where each spiral represented 30 minutes of activity. Behold, my snail collection!

Since I didn’t log (more like forgot to log) absolutely everything, there is a “miscellaneous” category in there that includes a hodgepodge of things like going to the bathroom, daydreaming, listening to a podcast, brushing my teeth, and changing my clothes.

Looking at the visuals, I’m kind of surprised that I logged 9 hours of sleep. It wasn’t the restorative kind of sleep for sure, but it was still a substantial amount of time. I’m guessing a good part of that was spent tossing and turning in the seat.

Another surprising part is how small the music-listening and watching category are. I went through several albums and TV shows on the plane, but I guess that didn’t really amount to much. Or it could be that I was too distracted to log. We’ll never know.

I’m thinking in the future I could look into animating each spiral similar to this, so I’ll look into that when I have the time. Anyway, I wish you never have to take such a long flight in economy class!

The Sketch file can be found here.