Show Me The Data

For Christmas back in 2020 my daughter got me a daily crossword puzzle calendar. That started a streak of completing a puzzle every day for two years. I tracked data on how fast I was able to complete each one, curious if I would get measurably better over time.

Today I finally sat down, put all the data into Excel, and crunched some numbers. Here’s a couple interesting results (interesting to me, at least):

Normally I aimed to complete a puzzle in about 15 minutes. For the most part my results clustered around that value, though my overall average across 623 puzzles was 15.9 minutes thanks to the occasional outliers in the 30-ish minute range. Fastest solve time was 6 minutes, which I accomplished 7 times.

This graph of rolling average (with a 30 day window) pretty clearly shows I got better over time as I suspected, going from a 20-ish minute average at start all the way down to 13-ish minute average towards the end. I’m happy with those results!

In total, I spent 165 hours working crosswords in 2021 and 2022, and while it’s not exactly the world’s most productive activity, there’s enough mental benefit that I don’t regret it.