Becoming a great data analyst is not something that happens overnight, which is why developing the right data analyst habits that can help you on a daily basis can significantly enhance your professional growth. Hey, my name is Sayful and I work as analyst within the financial services industry. In today’s blog I’m going to share with you my top five essential data analyst habits that have helped me and are still helping me on a daily basis.
Before jumping into the reading feel free to take a break and leave the data analyst habits that you think are essential in the comment section below to see if they’re similar to the ones I am going to name. Who knows, you may even have way better ones than mine. Starting out with habit number one which would be documenting your work in a clear and concise way so that others can easily read, understand, and reproduce your work if necessary.
As a data analyst there will be times when you’ll have to repetitive tasks and processes on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. Say for example I am currently the owner of a demand tracker Tableau dashboard for which the data source sits across multiple CSV files which are extracted from a project management tool. I need to clean and transform the data into multiple CSV files and save the output to a single Excel file which can then be loaded into Tableau as the data source.
I need to make sure that I document this process in detail so that others can reproduce my work if needed. I find a step-by-step guide with clear instructions is a great way to document your work. You could say for example use Notion to create step-by-step guides for whatever process or task that you own.
So first of all what is Notion? You can think of Notion as a single space to capture your thoughts, manage your projects, or even run an entire company as each team can have their own home base. I really like how simple and clean Notion is. You just need to start typing and that’s it.
The best bit about Notion for me is that it doesn’t have a rigid structure. I can pretty much add anything I want, icons, images, videos, and even code blocks. I can design the pages exactly the way I want them and if I change my mind I just need to drag and drop to rearrange.
I can create as many pages as I’d like and I can nest pages within pages within pages which makes it super easy to create a hierarchy. Everything has its place and I can find the pathways to exactly what I need. So let me quickly show you how I use Notion to create a step-by-step guide for cleaning and transforming the data into multiple CSV files into a single Excel file that serves as the input into the dashboard that I own.
So first I’ll create a new page with the title and I’ll add an icon as well to make it a bit more fun. Then I’ll add step one and make it a heading. I’ll insert a hyperlink to the actual LeanKit board and I’ll also add some instructions along with an image indicating where to click on the board to download the CSV extracts.
Then in step two I’ll state how to run the code and I’ll also include what’s actually in the script that we need to run just for reference. Then I move on to step three where I specify that the data source of the Tableau dashboard should be refreshed to account for this new updated Excel file. So if you’re interested, get started with Notion by signing up for free using the link in the description below.
By creating repeatable and reusable processes that your team members can also run you remove key person liabilities making life easier for others and yourself as well as you can quickly hand off any work that you have before you go on your holiday so you don’t have to worry about dashboard maintenance or updates. Habit number two would be to have a personal repository with useful code and functions at your fingertips. When I learned something that took me a while to figure out and is something that I think I will more than likely use in the future, I added to my personal repository of code functions and notes.
Now this can be as simple as a useful library that I found. Say for example recently I had some issues reading in a CSV file into a pandas data frame and I found the aliases library that can help me easily identify which encodings work for my chosen file. So I quickly included this piece of code into my personal repository.
Actually on this note, have you come across something super useful lately? Any tool, function, or code? Let me know in the comments below. Of course what you include depends entirely on your own preferences, just make sure to be selective with what you actually include as you don’t want your personal repository of useful stuff to turn into an ocean of information where you can’t find anything.
Habit number three, or rather habit number 3.1, would be to ask questions and when you do ask, make sure you actually listen to what others have to say.
Don’t under any circumstances answer your own questions. If someone already dedicated the time to provide you with free information, the least you can do is sit back, pay full attention, and listen to what they have to say and let them finish. Asking the right questions from the right people can help you solve the business problem much faster as you can utilize other people’s knowledge and experiences.
Now, I’d say just as important as asking the right questions is to not ask stupid questions. This might be an unpopular belief, but you know when they say there are no stupid questions? Well, I think there are. I think if the answer to your question is on the first page of Google searches, then I’m afraid it’s a stupid question.
Googling stuff I didn’t understand straight away, which takes a maximum of 30 seconds to be fair, has saved me from asking tons of questions throughout my career, so I highly recommend you do a quick Google search before asking as well. Even if you don’t find the answer, at least you have more context and background information. It can’t hurt you.
People in different roles with different backgrounds, skills, and seniorities will be interested in different aspects of the same thing. So habit number four would be to tailor your message to your audience by communicating effectively. Say, for example, if you have a Tableau dashboard with sales figures and you’re presenting to business users who are senior people with a non-technical background, you might want to consider focusing on the functionalities of the dashboard by highlighting the ease of usability.
Now, if you presented the same dashboard to your technical data analysts, they might be interested in how you built the visuals, what functions you used in your calculated fields, how you built your dynamic parameters, or where you sourced your data from. The conversation would clearly be different, be more granular, and you would drill into the detailed pieces of the underlying workings of the dashboard. A pro tip that one of my colleagues gave me a long time ago is that no matter how much time you think you have according to the meeting agenda, always try and get your message and your ask across within the first two to three minutes.
Meetings overrun, other people might eat into your allocated presentation time, and getting the key points across in just a couple of minutes has helped me several times in delivering my message and my ask when I was restricted to very little time. The field of data is constantly evolving, so staying up to date with the latest technologies, techniques, tools, and trends is crucial. So habit number five would be to keep on learning and developing, as otherwise you will very likely get left behind.
But what I find most useful and easiest for staying up to date is to simply follow the right people on social media channels like YouTube or LinkedIn. Talking about learning and development, what are some things that you want to learn in the near or longer term future? Is it a course? Is it a certification? Is it a tool or a coding language? Let me know in the comments below. In my experience, the hardest thing about learning new things in the field of data analytics is that you’ll very likely only utilize a very small proportion of the exact thing you learned, but you need to understand and learn enough to be able to connect the dots and see the bigger picture so that you can actually apply the skills.
Say for example, I learned how to write infrastructure as code to kick off redshift clusters in AWS, but to get to the point where I knew how and when I should be using redshift clusters as opposed to other AWS services took me a while. It wasn’t as easy as just memorizing 100 lines of code and just getting on with it. I had to understand AWS data storage and warehousing options before I could implement my code.
So that’s it! These are my top five essential data analyst habits that have helped me in the past and are still helping me big time on a daily basis. Thank you so so much for reading and I’ll see you in the next one!