How much time it actually takes
Updated
The field day is the visible part and it is the smallest.
Three clocks
Finding material. Processing it. Keeping it.
Beginners budget for the first, discover the second, and ignore the third until something goes wrong.
A collecting day
A full day, usually with a drive at each end, for a bucket of material.
Which is a poor rate measured in specimens per hour and is not why anybody does it.
Processing is the long pole
Unwrap, clean, trim, identify, catalog, number, label, photograph, house.
Call it fifteen to thirty minutes per specimen done properly. A day's collecting is therefore several evenings of processing.
That ratio is why backlogs form. Material comes in faster than it can be processed, every time, and the gap compounds.
The practical rule: process before you collect again. Unpopular, and it is the difference between a collection and a garage.
The annual work
A condition check, drawer by drawer, looking for pyrite decay, efflorescence and label loss.
A catalog export, kept somewhere other than the collection room.
A humidity review.
A few hours a year, and it is what stops a slow failure becoming a discovered one.