The Streamgraph

A one-page streamgraph — the flowing stacked-area chart for seeing how several streams swell, shrink and trade weight across ordered periods. Each row is a period and each named series becomes a coloured layer, but instead of stacking from a hard zero baseline like a bar chart, the whole stack floats around a centreline. That floating baseline makes the shape read like current in a river: surges, dips, handoffs and quiet fades stand out before you read the numbers. It is best when the story is not one exact value but the changing mix over time — hours shifting between deep work, meetings, recovery and play; revenue moving between product lines; topic volume by month; effort by workstream; attention across a season; energy across a week. A stacked bar compares period by period, but a streamgraph makes continuity visible. Type the stream names once, then list each period with a value for each stream; the layers centre, scale and colour themselves. Leave it blank to print the flowing frame and sketch the streams by hand.

• Landscape
• 1 page
• Tracking

Best for: Showing how several parts swell and recede across ordered periods — time audits, revenue mix, topic volume, project effort, or attention streams.