I have a confession to make - I am a Recovering Statsaholic. No, I do not mean the website Statsaholic. I mean I couldn’t stop looking at my own web stats no matter how hard I tried.

What is it with Number of Visits? Referrals? Keyword Analysis? Visit Length? Amount of Page Views?…and so on. I would scour over them an average of 2 - 3 hours a day. Now I am getting closer to the point where I try to spend about 20 mins in the morning, afternoon and evening looking it over. Though sometimes when I have nothing to do I find myself opening my stats page again and browsing through it. I hope to cut it down to just the morning and evening for no more than 15 mins each.

It can be fun sometimes to see who has linked to you and what type of pages are your highest traffic attractors but it gets to a point where enough is seriously enough. I used to wonder to myself at the end of the day, Darn! I could have done so much more with that time - only to do the same thing the next day.

Here’s what I did to get myself on the road to recovery from my Statsaholism.

• Gave my self a goal to maintain my posting frequency and write quality, well structured and thought out posts across all my blogs and websites.
• Made a point to only check my stats in the morning, afternoon and evening for no more than 15 - 20 mins.
• Logged myself out from stats services {or closed open tabs} instead of saving sessions so I wouldn’t feel compelled to just click and enter.
• Lastly, kept myself accountable for time lost browsing stats by putting a dollar amount to it.

If you have any tips you used to stop spending too much time checking your stats whether it be Google Analytics, Feedburner, Technorati or any other stats service you use please share them with me and the readers by commenting.

My full RSS feed will keep you updated on Statsaholism.

*bar depicted is actual traffic stats for everybodygoto.com, in server requests.

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.