Tips to Staying Productive: Check Your Email and Stats Just Twice Per Day

One of the biggest pitfalls of running a blog is that it is so easy to fall into the trap of checking your emails and stats (such as Google Adsense, etc.) every couple of minutes.

Everyone does it at one time or another. You sign up for your Google Adsense account, you start receiving traffic, and you are refreshing your stats every five minutes. A click comes in, you make a bit of money, and it's time to rejoice by checking your stats every 30 seconds instead of every 5 minutes.

You are now changing the dates in Adsense in order to check your stats even faster (if you are an Adsense user, you know what I am talking about.)

Or, you are trying to exchange links with some prominent blogs in your sector, and you are checking your emails every five minutes. You think to yourself, I want to answer as soon as their email comes in.

The problem with both of these things is that before you know it, your day is over and you have spent the entire day just checking stats and not doing any real work.

It can be almost impossible to get into the flow of writing an article if you are interrupting yourself every five minutes to check your stats.

What you need to do is this. Check your email and stats once to start the day, and once at the end of the day.

The people emailing you don't need to be responded to immediately (hey, you could have been sleeping when they emailed), and the stats will be the same no matter how many times you check them throughout the course of the day.

This way, by checking your stats and emails at the beginning and end of each day, you are giving yourself the opportunity to have a long, uninterrupted working session.

You will find that this is immeasurably valuable in terms of your productivity and work flow, and I would highly recommend it. Adsense is going to end up the same at the end of the day, no matter how many times you check it!