One of the key disciplines with stats, which is unfortunately not helped by the default configuration of most popular tools (looking at YOU Google Analytics), is that it either drives decisions or it is useless. If you are checking stats more frequently than you're making decisions based on them, you're wasting time.

Spend an hour and condense the stuff you absolutely need into a dashboard, and schedule time to do any drill down or reporting you need to do on a regular basis. Then, ignore the flowing river of noise your tools would otherwise distract you with.

P.S. If you find yourself rationalizing a once-an-hour check as a sanity test, either put it in a dashboard that you can check out of the corner of your eye while doing productive work, or reduce your heuristic to code and then fire it on a cron job. The computer's time is cheap. Yours is not.