How to Gain Seven Hours of Productivity Per Week

I have a couple of relatively new blogs, at least new to active growth, Sports Writer HQ being one of them. I recently found that, in my drive to attract new readers, more traffic and more income, I had become obsessed with checking my numbers (traffic, revenue, etc.). Sometimes, I would check them several times per hour!

After reading Leo Babuta's popular post, The Essential Guide to Growing Your Blog on Minimal Time, at Problogger.net, I decided to take action against myself.

It may be a baby-step, but I have cut back my stat checking to once per day, before bedtime. At this blog's developmental stage, checking the rate of growth more than once per week may be ridiculous, but the few seconds it takes to check once per day beats the aggregate 40 minutes to an hour of stat checking throughout the day. (could that sentence be any longer?) Sure, SHQ is growing in readership and email list subscribers every day, and I'm smiling, but obsessive stat checking is a real killer to productivity and growth.

One hour per day equates to, yes, 7 hours per week. Seven hours! In that amount of time, I could have written 8 or 10 blog posts, done a boat-load of forum posting, research, social media marketing, or lots of other productive, essential things.

2 minutes here, 5 minutes there, 10 minutes at lunch, and so on seems pretty harmless. Until you add them up, that is.

I hope most of you aren't like me. I hope you haven't wasted months of productive time. If you have, forget about it, change your habits and start growing faster than ever.

Don't forget to join the email list, using the form in the right column. Help me make up for lost time!