My stat checking seems to depend on how much time I have devoted to improving my adsense in the recent days and weeks. When I made little changes to my adsense layout or set up I'm normally pretty good checking maybe once or twice a day - but when I' in the middle of reworking everything and trialing new methods I find myself checking every hour at best - every 20 minutes at worst, and even then I'm looking at the breakdowns and which sites are performing and which are not... To steal a phrase from gandolf I'm a TOSCer.
I use the Firefox Adsense plugin and have it set to keep me updated every 20 minutes. All it takes is a quick glance to the bottom right of the firefox window to see my totals. I check my channel stats once a day everymorning though.
Did anyone ever establish if that plugin was safe/secure? There was some concern about that way back when.