More than 2/3rds of the non-writing time will be spent organizing, manipulating and massaging the data.

We can’t even START to run our analysis until I spend the day (hopefully, weekend if need be) adding indicators, coding schools in one way and then applying that to our student level data set and otherwise wearing a layer off my fingers at the keyboard.

Worse is the fact that I am still doing all this in SPSS because I never have time to load the data into a proper database and do it there….Which, mind you, is what I do for a LIVING, so that should tell you what kind of deadlines I’ve been working under….

The remaining 33% is split between 30% figuring out the best way to do the analysis and 3% of actually running it.  They don’t tell you that either.