My Sitemeter and pMetrics Addiction And Other Things We Do Too Much

Hi, my name is Frank and I have a problem! I am addicted to Sitemeter and any other web site tracking package. My new love is pMetrics. The statistics are tailored for blogs and it lets you easily track your visitor’s movement within your site. It combines my favorite reports from other sites into one visitor overview page. Plus it is much faster than loading than everything else I have tried. I haven’t needed to visit SiteMeter or anything else since I signed up. I know The Happy Rock is a small site, but that just means that there is more chance I haven’t received a new hit since I last checked. It is a shame that doesn’t stop me from checking.

Every blogger can probably relate to this type of stat fascination. The real problem is that incessantly checking these stats adds no value. I would even go so far as to say that it probably hurts my overall productivity in life and for The Happy Rock. Here is how:

1. Wasted Time – Time spent doing something that I could easy do just a few times, rather then a few times an hour is a real waste. I really don’t have time to waste either.
2. Lost Focus – The preoccupation with stats and interruptions that the addiction causes probably has the biggest impact on my daily life.
3. Lost Perspective – Constantly focusing on one task can shape our strategy to revolve around only small piece of the puzzle. The usually translates into bad decisions.

For the blogger and non-blogger, the bigger question is what do we do when we can’t stop ourselves from getting too much of a good thing or too much of things that provide little or no value? We all have plenty of these things in their life.

The start of the process is getting the problem out in the open, like I am doing here. It has been a day since I have written this, and just by sharing and listing the negative consequences the lure of stat checking has already lost some of its power.

What things do you know in the back of your mind you should avoid altogether or drastically cut back? J.D @ Get Rich Slowly shared yesterday that he recently got bitten by an old Magic The Gathering addiction to the tune of $161. Let’s start by getting the problem out in the open and listing the negative ways that it affects our lives and our money in the comments section. In a future post I will post reader tips and some concrete ways that I am going to deal with my pMetrics addiction.

Disclosure: pMetrics is an affiliate link, although that doesn’t change how good it is!