Want a quick way to kill your creativity & become amzingly unproductive?
Want to stop doing meaningful things and just spent hours staring at your computer screen doing nothing but thinking about doing something, someday?
Here’s what you do:
Focus on the numbers
They’ll convince you that they’re really important. That they’re great for “metrics” and that by analyzing them incessantly you’ll be much more effective than you’ve been previously. Nevermind that you’ll seldom actually do any analyzing besides “That’s a smaller/bigger number than before” or the fact that you’re not quite sure what “metrics” are, once the numbers make eye contact with you and get you fixated on them, you’re screwed.
The numbers:
They’re pretty, paralyzing and usually meaningless.
The last few days, I’ve been in a creative rut. I couldn’t figure out why until I realized that instead of creating, I was spending a obscene amount of time focusing on the numbers.
Numbers are everywhere and instead of actually doing anything, I was just checking their status. And there are a lot to check.
Here’s a partial list of numbers I find myself bombarded with on a daily:
- Email Subscribers
- RSS Subscribers
- Blog Comments
- Site Analytics
- Facebook Fans
- Twitter Followers
- Klout Score
- Email Account #1 Unread Messages
- Email Account #2 Unread Messages
- Email Account #3 Unread Messages
- Google Reader Items
- Google Tasks
- Bank Account Balance #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
- Mint Account
- Credit Card Balances
- Paypal Balance
- Kiva Loans
- Facebook Notifications
- Twitter @replys, dms, etc
That’s just the start…
A watched pot never boills.
Did you ever hear that from one of your grandparents? Well it’s true. The real kicker about all these numbers?
They don’t even change that much
Seriously. None of those numbers require me to check them more than once/day (or 1x/week for that matter) and here I was checking them multiple times a day. Things like my paypal balance [And I don’t even use paypal that often!]. It wasn’t an effort to see & analyze my spending habits more effectively, it was just a way for me to satisfy the lizard brain & focus on something else besides creating. I was so caught up checking them, that I never get about to doing anything about them.
There’s this really cool plugin from MailChimp that tells me all sorts of cool info about my mailing list, site analytics & subscribers and wraps it together in cool shiny graphics all in my wordpress dashboard. It’s awesome.
I’m turning it off.
Same with the plugin I have to show RSS subscribers in my dashboard. Off
Why?
Everytime I login to create something, I get distracted by the shiny graphics from mail chimp, gaze at their beauty & quickly move on to something else, non-related to what I was going to create. [Edit: I also stumbled across this post from Raam Dev while writing this and he’s dead on. Read it]. So I’m turning them off for now, forgetting about the numbers & getting back to doing impossible things [Like the 10k & 1/2 marathon I just signed up for].
Stop playing the numbers game. Start creating.
Since the only numbers I can check are my comments, twitter @replies, and email inbox, I check them way too often.
Yes, subscriber numbers matter. Follower counts do matter. All those numbers, to a point, do matter. They’re measures of influence.
However, what’s the best way to build influence? Act like you’re writing for one person. Like Raam said, communicate with people, not statistics.
Make a difference. Make things happen. Stop sitting around. Don’t look at numbers you can’t control…
All good advice, man. Great post, even though no one reads blogs on weekends 🙂
Yup, yup, yup 🙂
Numbers DO matter, but they don’t deserve anywhere near the importance that I usually deem upon them.
Thanks for being one of my weekend readers 🙂
I try to discipline myself to do one check, on the 15th of each month. It’s mainly to reassure myself that everything is still heading in the right direction. (But just this morning I checked my subscriber numbers again, even though I checked them last night.)
Good call: focus on the things that matter, not the things that measure.
“Focus on the things that matter, not the things that measure” – I like that :).
These days it’s easy to get buried under a tsunami of information be it statistics, social media, email, IM’s, old school phone calls, tweets. I’ve struggled with this as well. An email comes in, Tweetdeck pops up, a new Facebook post…there are so many distractions that I wasn’t getting any writing done. And that was very frustrating. So now I setup media free time periods where I close out email, close down Tweetdeck, shut it all down and just meditate on writing without the distractions (well except for the kids banging on the door). As Brett said number are important as a gauge of progress but they are not everything especially when checking them all the time actually hinders progress.
Excited to be hearing much more about your 10K and 1/2 marathon coming up. Also, I’m not reading this or posting this comment on a Saturday. 😉
I’m excited to have some new goals being set. =) I’m starting to adopt that media free time. It’s hard because I spend so much time on my computer, but I’m going to try & give it a shot.
It is certainly easy to get completely bogged down with the idea of constant updates. Information is wonderful to be able to give you direction, but TMI can really be a bad thing as it can actaully slow and bog you down
I check my numbers way too often. I’m cutting back a bit. I no longer check rss subscribers, but I still login to my analytics account way too much. I’ve really got to limit myself to once a day at the very most.
I know exactly what you mean. Honestly, there’s not a good enough reason why I should be checking them more than 1/week, much less 1/day or multiple times/day. It’s amazing how it can pull your focus in completely different directions and have you start worrying about things you can’t control. Thanks for stopping by Anthony 🙂
p.s. right after I posted this comment, my initial urge was to check today’s analytics. AHH! I have a problem… =) [Good thing I deactivated it]
True, true, Joel.
It’s so easy to get wrapped up in checking, and rechecking email and subscriber counts and who’s following you where. And then just one more quick peek before I shut down the laptop . . .
I have been focusing the last couple of days on going to war with my email inbox. The unread messages have gotten a bit out of control. But I’m determined to get them back down to zilch, so that I can get back to a much less frequent schedule of “batching” them.
Thanks for the post! Now quit reading your comments and get back to creating stuff . . .
Yessir! haha.
Creating space to ‘batch’ process stuff is really key. Do everything at once and then don’t check it again till you need to. Doing things on a one-off basis, can absolutely suck time like nobody’s business.