Dear Medium: I’m Back to Checking My Stats Page 1,000 Times a Day!

And, yes, there’s a lesson to learn even with this ‘addiction’…

When Medium dressed up the stats page in preparation for Christmas last year, my feed was filled with stories about the unannounced change.

I wrote about it too: The Medium Wild Dance: Are You Affected?

One of the recurrent issues that every story I read detailing the change highlighted was that the new stats page did not update in real-time, which was a good or bad thing — depending on how one looked at it.

In my usual characteristic manner, I chose to focus on the good — and that was when I penned down the story embedded below.

I was spending too much time on the stats page and I believed that the once-a-day update schedule was a blessing in disguise.

Over the following weeks, I managed to ignore this page completely and if someone had told me that it still existed around Christmas, I would have been taken aback.

But, when I checked back recently to see how the New Year was faring, I discovered a little update: the stats now update in real-time, story views and reads.

As I pointed the cursor at the oscillations, it took me more than five minutes to process…

…I was back with real-life stats updates…and as you know, bad habits die hard!

Before the recent little update, I had promised myself to avoid the stats page — and I was doing very well for myself, in that regard.

The free time and energy saved was invested in other areas of my online business which I believed were suffering as a direct result of my obsession with the reality of checking stats.

Everything was going very well and my toxic relationship with the stats page was, I believed, put to an end…

…until things became live again — and it came to my attention.

There’s a lesson to learn in every story and this is what I strive to live by.

When I found myself peering at the stats page again more than I’d love to, what I asked myself was: why is this happening again (especially since I believed it was under control, prior?)

The honest answer stunned me: I had been exposed (again) to the trigger — and that part of me that couldn't contain suspense was once again, awoken.

Back to the basics and a lesson learned: if you want to remove temptations from your life, keep them far away from you — and this includes all the New Year things you promised yourself not to get close to in 2024.

Leaving things the way they present themselves and throwing up one’s hands in the air isn’t an inspiring way to live; it shouldn’t be anyone’s style, too and it certainly isn’t mine.

If Medium is taking my time and I’m trapped on its stats page, what could be better than taking it a little more seriously to get the time expended here, justified?

If you’re in the same shoes as I am, think about this.

Don’t let an algorithm play ‘tapestry’ with what stories you see; subscribe to get notified directly in your inbox whenever I publish.