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!
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Write a little application that will pull all the data into a single page where it is automatically updated.
David, can you do the financial end of this through Mint.com? I don’t know much about the service, but from what I understand you give it various information about your accounts and it pulls all this data into one page on your account.
Now as for the blog stats… that, I don’t know a good solution. I haven’t set mine up yet, which is good, because I’m sure it would keep me quite occupied
I’m similar to you in that I check my blog stats quite frequently. BlogRush is such a worthless app in my opinion, so I took it off my blog
p.s. - Hey Lise, haha!
Lise: Blog stats definitely will!!!
I will need to check Mint.com out since I haven’t looked at it since it launched. Thanks for reminding me about this. I’m a little scared to put in all my financial information on a website that I know little about though. It’s one thing to put it into Microsoft Money but it is another to put it in something else.
Modern Worker: Blogrush is a good idea but people probably just ignore that widget. Oh well, it was a good effort though
I have a big problem with checking stats. Its constant. Some things have helped like the firefox adsense notifier plugin. My adsense is always in the bottom roght corner now.
Guitar Hero: I just need a firefox plugin that notifies me of EVERYTHING
A customizible one would be nice!
Is BlogRush really worth using? Has it really generated any substantial traffic benefits?
-Raymond
Money Blue Book: So far not really. It’s a good idea but everyone probably just ignores that widget since I get very little traffic if any from it.