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Ok so it's Monday and already we're off to a great start without actually doing anything. A really big storm came in from the west overnight, ripping roofs off houses, knocking out power lines, blowing down big trees, lots of thunder and lightning ... and it all fizzled out about 30 miles from our place.

Hopefully that's an indication that this is going to be a very good week. There are some other positive signs too; we've had some nibbles this morning from potential clients who have liked our proposals and checking some stats this morning has shown that a few of our smaller sites are really performing well.

When you're hard at work every day trying to make that next site really sing when it comes to search engine placement and sales it's sometimes very easy to miss the fact that your older sites are performing well. So it doesn't hurt to sit back and review how your sites are actually doing. You might be surprised to see just how well they are doing in a very competitive market.

Of course you might also see how badly they're doing so taking time to look back at what you've done in the past and finding failure can be a positive too. When you can look at what you've done in the past and identify the reasons for failure you can then make the changes that are necessary to improve your new sites so that they don't make the same mistakes.

I guess the hardest thing to do though is not to get obsessed about stats. It's so easy to spend way too many hours pouring over the information that you can glean from your stats packages but it is important to spend some time looking at your stats because you never know what you might find.

Productivity
As I said a moment ago, you can spend too much time looking at your stats and that can sure eat up your productivity to the point where you're actually wasting time rather than using it wisely.

These days another way you can waste time is by not having the right equipment to work with. You might think that a computer and one monitor is all you need and, when you're first starting out, that really is about all you need in the way of hardware but it's not long before you need more.

A couple of years ago Steve and I both switched over to twin monitors. At first a few of our friends thought that two monitors was just a total waste of money and that may be the way you're still thinking but, as I said back when we made the change, just do the sums.

Even if you're just building free sites or galleries you can be constantly switching between a couple of different programs and/or screens. You can have your HTML editor open, an image manipulation program open and a window that displays all the banners you've downloaded from your sponsor.

Raising and dropping the screens for those different programs every time you need to change from one to the other might seem like a very small amount of time but count the number of times you might do it in a day, multiply that by a week, a month and a year and then factor in what your time is worth by the hour and you're soon talking about many hundreds of dollars.

Compare that to the cost of a graphic card that can handle two monitors plus the cost of a second monitor and spread it over a few years and you'll soon see that you're actually saving money while being more productive if you use two screens.

Well that's the way it was a few years back for us. Now we're running an online business that not only remotely employs a number of people but also requires us to keep up with a constant flow of information from a number of different sources and two monitors just aren't enough any more. So over the next few months Steve and I are moving towards having three monitors for each computer both here at the office and at home.

Once again, it may seem like a waste of money but we've done our sums and even though we're running two monitors on each of our desktop machines investing in a third monitor is actually going to save us time and we all know that time is money.

So how's your productivity? Is it time to step up to two monitors or is it time you upgraded from two to three monitors?

Do the sums and you might find that spending some extra cash on a second or third monitor might actually make you more money in the long term.