Stepping on the Stats Scale

One of the standard pieces of advice you recieve when you go on a diet is to not step on the scale everyday....let alone three or four times per day. It is misleading and can be distructive. Once a week or so is plenty....better yet, look at how your clothes fit.

Statistics have become the scale of the internet. Stats for our blogs, our websites, our networking site, our Etsy page or EBay listing. How did we ever live without all these numbers. Keeping score for us. How many people are visiting us? How long do they stay? What did they look at? Where did they come from? Our mood can surge or plummet based on our stats.

All this information can be helpful, but it can also be a distraction. We can get lost in a lot of details that do nothing to really inform us.....especially when we check the stats multiple times per day. It is hard not to be drawn to the numbers. Especially if we are starting up a blog, or getting set up on a site like Etsy. But is hourly checking of the numbers helping you accomplish your goals?? What if you checked every few days or once a week? Think of all the noise in your brain from all that data that could be quieted.

Sure, it is good to know if anyone is visiting your blog. And it is nice to know how they find you. But when we look at that information obsessively, it gets us off track of our true goals. Suddenly the numbers become our goal. We can become driven by the statistics. The reason we began our effort in creating a website, or a blog gets buried in the stats.

Just like we can have sudden drops or spikes in our weight from day to day, a sudden spike in the numbers can pull our attention away from where we need to be focusing our energy. If we get a big spike because someone with lots of traffic linked to our site, it can be heady. But it can also seem so empty when they all move onto the next link the following day. With a longer perspective we can see the base of our traffic.

I find myself falling into this stats trap. But since I have been so busy with work in my studio lately, I have broken the stats habit. And I realize that it can be a huge distraction. I have lived many years, very happily, without having to know how many visitors came to my page on that day, and where they came from. It is fun to know that I have links from a blog in Estonia. But it does not help me write a better blog entry. It is great to see the impact of a press release on PRWeb has had in driving traffic to my website. But it is only in the longer view that I can really see how effective the tool has been.

Do you have a stats habit that needs curbing? Do you walk around quoting the number of visitors your blog has gotten this week, and what your Technorati rating is up to? It may be time to walk away from the computer for a bit and start withdrawing from the habit. See how much more useful the information can be when it is viewed once a week instead of three times a day. And see what things fill the vaccuum. Perhaps you will not miss the stats much at all. And you wonder why you didn't do it sooner.