I’m very similar. I have a meticulous and very manual spreadsheet to track how much time it takes to write each newsletter:

• “no one told me about proust,” published this May: 17 hours, 42 minutes (obviously not including the time spent reading In Search of Lost Time)

• “how to speak to a computer,” published this October: 26 hours, 24 minutes

I tend to spend even more time on commissioned pieces…my latest essay for Asterisk Magazine took 77 hours, 40 minutes.