Re: Hours played
I'm just a beginning player, but I feel fairly confident in my grasp of the statistics behind most poker record-keeping, so take my ideas for whatever you want. I don't claim to be any sort of expert on this topic.
To me, the problem with not recording hourly stats is that, if you assume each "session" is the same as all the others, any inferences you attempt to draw from these data will be severely polluted.
At best, you will lose a ton of precision around your win rate. Think of measuring your car's fuel efficiency by recording how many days you go before you have to refill your tank. This will give you some idea of how it's doing, but if you want to get a meaningfull measure, you'd use miles per gallon since you don't drive the same distance every day. At worst, your results will be severely biased due to correlation between your winning/losing status and the amount of time you play in a given "session" as well as many other factors.
Even if you record the total number of hours played and total win/loss amount, but not the hourly stats, you will not be getting all of the information you could and, therefore, will lose a ton of power for your statistical analyses. If you're serious about keeping records and learning from them, it seems to me that hourly stats are by far the best way to do it. They're also much easier to interpret and analyze than info on sessions that vary in length.
All of the poker authors I've read (which, admittedly is just a few) have endorsed keeping hourly records. Once you have this data, you can begin to make inferences about your performance as well as how it changes with time, type of games played, and other factors.
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