It’s a technical term, chimping.

You’ve been chimping everyday and don’t even know it.

Photographers use it to describe the act of looking at your photo immediately after capturing it. Like an excited chimpanzee showing off for his own ego, you point to your screen and grunt “oooh oooh, look what I did 👏👏👏!”

Yes, you’ve done it for pics, but you’ve been chimping way more than that.

You’ve been picking up your phone to check how many likes your last Instagram post had. You’ve been checking your ads to to see how your latest marketing promo did. You’ve been watching your website traffic like a panther stalking a gazelle, worried that if you lose sight of it for too long your dinner will bolt.

It’s not just you.

I picked up my iPhone 571 times in the past 7 days.

Five. Hundred. Seventy. One.

That’s an average of 81 pickups per day or once every 11 minutes!

If it’s not readily apparent, chimping is a problem for a few reasons:

👀You’re trading events happening elsewhere for events happening to, near, and all around you.
🤦🏻‍♂️It puts unneceasary pressure on you to get immediate results.
🙇🏻‍♂️Your concentration is destroyed, your flow ruined.
📱 It zaps your energy (not to mention the battery on your phone).
😤 You might react poorly to what’s happening now instead of reacting more intelligently after seeing a trend.
🏄🏻‍♂️You’re missing out on the whole experience of business and working for what you love.
🏋🏻‍♂️With every chimp, you decrease confidence in yourself.
😕It’s rude in the presence of others. They won’t say anything because they do it too, but they’ll feel it, and they’ll remember you weren’t really paying attention.
🛑 There’s no reason!

Stop looking for likes and shares. Stop checking email every 2 minutes. Stop worrying about web traffic, ad campaigns, and notifications every damn second of the day.

Chimping doesn’t change anything. Just like a picture that’s already taken, you can’t go back and make it better. But you CAN make change for the better here and now.