Savvy Affiliate

Wean Yourself off Stat checking, and get a lot more done

 New bloggers and even old hands are often addicted to checking their stats.  How often have you looked at your analytics statistics, surfed over to AdSense, checked Mybloglog, and then went back to Analytics 15 minutes later to see if anything had changed?  That has sure described me every now and then.  But this frequent stat checking can be a huge time killer.  I have found that doing this several times a day wastes even more time than e-mail.  At 5 minutes a pop, checking my stats can quickly eat up 30-50 minutes a day.  And I need every half hour I can scrounge.

I have come up with a plan to wean myself off stat checking.  The goal is to get down to 1 check per day, right before I close up for the night.  I have no need to know what is going on in 15 minutes increments, knowing my daily results is quite good enough thank you very much.

However to kick my stat checking habit, I realized I need visual feedback.

I can’t rely on my memory of how many times I checked my stats today.  Am I doing better than yesterday?  Stats all begin to get hazy in my mind.   So to give myself visual feedback, I put a calendar on the wall next to my computer.  Every time I check my Analytics I give that day a tick, every time I check AdSense, that day gets a tick.  (My blog log doesn’t get a tick because I usually only check it once a day anyway, right after analytics)

By putting up a calendar, at the end of the week I can see how well I did

The calendar acts to shame me in to being honest with myself.  If at then end of the week I see a lot of days with 2 ticks, one for AdSense and one for Analytics, I know I restrained myself.  If I see days with 10 ticks, I know I need a little more self control, not unlike a person trying to quit smoking who cheats every now and then.

Actually, what I really need is an online calendar.  Every time I go to analytics or AdSense it adds a tick mark on that day.  The calendar could be displayed on this blog for all to see.  That level of visibility would do great at limited my stat checking, and consequently increasing my productivity.  Perhaps when Google controls my life they can add that feature

So do you check your stats frequently?  Perhaps too frequently?  Have you decided to try and cut back?  What is your plan?