How Many Hours to Record an Album?

I think it would be very hard to calculate the number of hours to record an album. I've been asked this before, "how long did it take you to do this"? The song writing process is very fluid, ideas come in sections a lot of times. During the song construction phase, the parts get moved around and re-vamped, and you don't have a stopwatch rolling. Once the recording starts (especially if recording in your project studio like I do) time just slips by.

I ask the question as am curious. Do the people that buy our CD's understand how much time, effort, money, and sacrifice it took? How can we get them to understand or appreciate what we do more?