Back in 2012, I began in earnest on a project that reached its last milestone on March 30, 2018. My first publication of a co-authored paper in an academic journal. You can find it here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2017.1176
There are many other academics into their second year who have more publications than me. It can be very difficult to get a job at one of our top tier schools without one more more publications in a top-tier publications. Due to the nature of my work, I imagine I will be lucky to have a dozen opportunities to engage in a project like this in my career.
Data collection took about 14 months, data analysis took years, we (Linda Argote, Brandy Aven, and myself) wrote for months even before submission, and there were of course the slow but thorough series of peer reviews we received. We collected 109 groups for this paper. Each session was 2 hours and required about a half hour on either side to setup. I probably had to cancel 20-25 sessions due to no shows. In aggregate, we probably easily used 450 hours of lab time to collect the data for this study. I was there for most, but not all of it (I had some wonderful RAs). The time works out to something like an hour a day, every day, throughout the data collection period.
I wasn't always happy about being the lab, the frustrations of late or no-show participants, or technical problems. But, I thought we were onto something, and it's wonderful to get validation from others that we were.