Potty Training
When my wife and I adopted our second dog, we assumed the potty training would go pretty seamlessly like our first (granted, I was in Tanzania for three weeks while our first dog was being potty trained, so the processed seemed very easy to me). Things were a bit more challenging with our second dog since she was younger and as it later turned out, had some parasites.
In order to try to stay sane and get a sense of when/why she was having her accidents, we started tracking walks and accidents in Google Sheets. I plotted the data each week to find patterns and evaluate how we were doing each week. At the end of the day, it wasn’t terribly illuminating - she had most of her accidents at night, most were directly after eating or having the zoomies (and yes, you’ll note there were some very early mornings mixed in). The good news is we finally got through it, though we do still get in quite a few walks a day.
Tools
- Pen and paper: mock up image and layouts
- Google Sheets: time tracking and categorization of events
- R: data munging and visualization
- Git: version control for R code
- Adobe Illustrator: (minimal) post-production viz clean up/editing
