Everyone in our (tiny) co watches them throughout the day. If the info is valuable enough it can give you very useful insight into the "life" of your startup organism.

If it's wasting your time there's something wrong with your system or way your presenting the data -- it takes me about 5 secs to pull up and understand a solid snapshot of all our stats.

I use google analytics and awstats.

The point is variance in data tends to decrease with frequency. Weekly or Monthly data tends to make lot more sense than hourly or daily stats. But its difficult to resist the temptation to watch is hourly/daily

I think you should probably look at them once a week. Don't get too obsessed with pure traffic stats as they can be misleading!

GF is addicted and she has hardly any visitors, i stopped looking after the traffic went v high and it was all just boring then.