A through scan is going to take a considerable time (so I would suggest it is a fire and forget {go to bed} activity), especially if you are also scanning archives. I would recommend you do one of these shortly after you have installed avast to ensure your system is clean. I would only run it after any serious infection or suspect activity.
I run a standard scan (without archives) weekly since the resident scanners provide adequate protection for day to day use, scanning created, modified, or opened files. An archive file is inert until you open (unzip) it and run one of the files inside, the standard shield will scan this activity. So scanning archive files on a regular basis is wasted processing effort based on there risk (IMHO).