this leads me into a long time wish 
count and save the songedit time (running renoise time with that certain song loaded).
I would love to see this feature added at some point. It shouldn’t be that difficult, right? Could even account for idle time for better accuracy.
I was asked on multiple occasions how long does it take me to finish a song, and I seriously have no clue. I usually peg it at around 20 hours, but I think that quite often it takes much longer than that.
My typical workflow is that I first try different VSTs or samples, and try to find something that sounds interesting at the moment. Once I have that first instrument and some simple melody, it sets the tone for the whole song. (This also implies that I usually have no prior plan of what the song is going to be - I might have a very general idea like EDM, or guitar, or orchestral instruments, but that’s usually the extend of my planning when I sit down to compose something). The next step is usually percussions. Then some fillers and baseline. My goal is to have approximately 20 seconds of “finished” music first. Once I have that, then I try to go from there and evolve the song in some interesting ways. I can go way off course with this, though. For example, in the music I’m working on these days, I went from EDM to an orchestral part somehow. Things like that seriously increase the time I spend on my songs, since I basically have to compose two different tunes. So I guess my composing time varies greatly depending on how many different melodies/themes I have in my song. I usually go for lots of varieties - I seldom repeat any parts of my song at all. I would be hard pressed to find a song where the same pattern plays twice.
Once I have the song almost ready, that’s when I compose the beginning and end of it. Actually, the beginning of the song is what I usually compose last. It sounds counterintuitive, but I find that it makes the beginning sound more relevant to what the rest of the song is, once I know what the rest of the song sounds like.
Once the song is “ready”, I usually give it a day or two break, and then come back to listen to it. I quite often find that many transitions are incorrect - i.e. occur too early, too late, are too short or too long, or simply don’t sound good for whatever reason that I can’t quite put my finger on “why”. And so the process of re-doing things start, and it can take days or even weeks to truly finish. Sometimes, I start hating the song at some point. I feel like nothing fits anymore. And I abandon it for weeks or months (in some cases years) only to listen to it again at some point and love it again. It’s weird 
Based on my experience, the main time waster happens when you start trying out various instruments and/or very slight changes in melody of a fragment that already sounds good. If you have lots of instruments, you can start getting down the rabbit hole that will take hours, and all you will achieve is more and more slightly different variations that sound almost the same, but you get completely paralyzed with them and are unable to make a decision of which version to keep. I had lots of situations like this, when I would lose 2 - 3 hours only to go back to what was there to begin with. This can get frustrating when you realize you have just lost a few hours for nothing.
As for the whole process of composing and evolving a tune, I always compose something that I love myself. It unfortunately makes my songs quite difficult to listen to for other people. I never compose for the audience. I guess that’s the best part of doing this as pure hobby. I don’t need to adhere to any standards, good practices, current fads, etc. My music is always 100% mine, and I actually truly love all my songs (those that I finish). When you listen to somebody else’s song that you love, you keep repeating it many times and it almost feels like taking drugs every time you listen to it - you feel so good when it plays that you just can’t stop playing it. If you ever found a song like that, then you know how I feel when I compose something. I always look for that combination of instrument and melody that will trigger this kind of response in my brain. I don’t know the exact recipe to achieve that, so my composing is quite often a sort of brute-force approach, where I keep trying different instruments and melodies blindly until it “feels right”. This is probably not the “right” approach that they teach in music schools, though 
And it makes it really hard for me to say how long it takes to compose a music.
Hence, I would love it if Renoise would keep track of how long I work on various songs. I’m really curious to know!
). So I think that if you are really trying to focus on producing lots of music quickly, you should be able to re-use some parts that you made, but didn’t use while composing your previous songs. Just a thought.