I recently deleted my Facebook account. On my way out, I downloaded all the data the website had collected about me over the past nine years. Sifting through this data dump felt like looking through an old high school yearbook…a yearbook that knows way, way, way too much about you.
Of all the available information, I was most interested in my messenger activity. To be exact, I was able to pull together a dataset of 233,622 messages: 45% of which I composed and 55% of which I received.
Comparing the timestamps of messages from high school vs college subtly highlights a few of the lifestyle differences between the two life stages. See for yourself:
Messages from the years I was in high school show a consistent schedule: very little messaging during school hours (although still some, from weekends), a bit more activity in the afternoon, and then a huge spike after 6:00 PM. Then comes the huge drop off approaching the end of the day: Facebook conversations rarely went past midnight.
By contrast, my college years had me sending and receiving messages more consistently throughout the day. Because I was in class less often and followed an irregular schedule, I managed to find time to strike up text conversations at nearly all times of the day (in the aggregate). I was still more active on messenger in the evening, but just slightly.
My messenger data primarily highlights one major lifestyle change during college: my sleep habits. As mentioned previously, I was rarely on Facebook in the late hours of the night - because I was usually asleep by then! By contrast, midnight was one of my most active times to be on messenger in college. No longer was it possible to finish all of my coursework and still get to sleep before midnight - nor was it as important, considering I designed my course schedules around the sole goal of avoiding early morning classes…
If you're interested in recreating these graphs using your own messages, you can download your Facebook data here, then find my code written for this project on my GitHub.