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I’m one of those people that love to know how I am doing every second of the day. This means that if there are some statistics that I can get my hands on, I will go check it. I’m so addicted in knowing that I will check everything multiple times a day, lowering my productivity. It is quite bad right now and I should not let this get worst!

Just off the top of my head, I can think of these statistics that I check multiple times each day

Website
• RSS subscribers
• Daily visitors by the hour
• Referring site hit count
• Search engine referrals
• Blog rush stats (when they are working)

Investments
• Taxable stock and fund prices
• Roth IRA account performance
• 401k stats (I don’t know why I check this more than once a day because it only updates once a day on weekdays!)
• Stock prices of several stocks that I’m interested in
• Major index performances (Dow Jones Industrial, Nasdaq, and S&P 500)

As you can see, I’m happy to say that life is good because I still have a job! I can see that this situation is just going to get worst as information technology becomes better and better since statistics will be updated more frequently. After thinking about this a bit, I have come up with basically two things to help get me off the addiction.

1) Check stats less often! This is the obvious solution since everyone knows that no one is going to die if I don’t know what’s going on with all those stats for more than 5 seconds especially when I don’t day trade.

It will also calm me down throughout the day because I’m not worried about the daily fluctuations of everything, giving me a chance to focus more on the big picture (good for both the website and my investment portfolio).

2) Write a little application that will pull all the data into a single page where it is automatically updated. At least I can just keep this page on my desktop or go to one place where everything is right there. Currently, I would log into 7 different places to check for the list of statistics I mentioned. (Doing the “logon rounds” multiple times daily helped train me to be a faster typist though but maybe being more productive is a better option)

This is what I have so far. Do you have a better suggestion? Do you or did you ever have the same addiction or stat checking syndrome? Let us know how you changed so we can all learn from each other!