How Do You Stop Yourself Checking Google Analytics/email lists?

Set it up to get a weekly email. You should have an idea of what's going on, but doing it this way will keep you up to date without really wasting your time going to different sites and looking at this or that stat which may or may not be important right now.

Metrics are fun in the early days; they can give you the motivation you need to get a blog post out and it's worth celebrating your successes. So my suggestion would be to make a simple to view dashboard using something like Geckboard.

Have an iPad or second screen with the Dashboard and limit yourself to looking at that during the work day unless you have a specific analytics project you're working on which should have an explicit problem/goal which you're looking to solve.

I check Google Analytics more than I'd like to. I find it's helpful to dig in and check how new marketing tactics are going, but if I find myself checking them without a specific intention I have to remind myself that checking analytics isn't pushing the business forward.

I'm still in the super early stages of my project, but I've opted to use the nginx access.log file as my sole source of analytics data. Right now I'm just using GoAccess locally, so my process is each night after my final commit I run a simple script that downloads the access.log files, concatenates them and then pipes them into GoAccess.

The data is less detailed than what google analytics gives you, but for my uses I'm very happy with the detail of the data I get this way. Since the process doesn't involve a web browser I'm not checking it constantly.