How often do you check your AdSense earnings a day? At times I find myself almost obsessing about earnings of clicks through different channels, then tweeking my site. I have to make myself stop...I need AA (Adsense Anonymous).
Here are two pages of answers from an identical thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1052194
Let me offer some advice here. This is just a guess, but I would say that your earnings are probably similar every day, so checking several times per day is just to make you feel better. It also suggests that you are wasting time that could be spent getting more visitors to your site and increasing the adsense $$.
I waste maybe 1 minute of my day. I have adsense open in a another browser window so I can glance at the changes every hour or so...like I said, I need AA sometimes, but it isn't every day. As far as my earnings go, yes they are roughly about the same. Just being honest here. I never said it was productive.
I know what you mean because I used to do it. It kind of gives you a lift and you always hope there is more $$. Fair enough when you are optimizing it, but I stopped to concentrate on getting my sites earning more.
At the beginning, I think that everybody does it, until they realize what a waste of time it is. Then you start to feel more and more comfortable to check your earnings in a more reasonable way.
When I first started, I used to check it almost hourly. But, fortunately, I don't do that anymore. Now, probably like twice a day or so. But, sometimes, I also go a week without checking stats. It really depends.
When I am writing an article or doing some type of work on my sites, I need mental breaks, if even for a minute. That's when I check on my adsense revenue for the day or my affiliate sales sites to see if what I am doing is worth while . Sure I know I could use that time to write another sentence or work on that graphic, etc. during that time. But my mind needs to take a brief rest. I might even spend a few minutes at my arcade site and play a game of ping pong... I do feel better when I see my adsense amount has gone up. I don't smoke so looking at adsense is my hourly addiction, but healthier.