Recent opinions in the car building world state that to do a proper, frame-off restoration of a muscle car takes about 1400 to 1600 hours.  I would say that estimate is fairly accurate.  I worked on my car about 2 to 3 hours a day, nearly every day, for a little over 2 years.  That's an average.  Some days I didn't touch it and some Saturdays and Sundays I worked on it all day.  So 2 hours a day X 365 days X 2.3 years = 1679 hours.  To have worked less on it and reduced the hour total, I would have had to pay people, which of course runs up the cost VERY QUICKLY.  It greatly depends on the car you start out with, so if you want to spend less time, fork over some extra money for a nice starting car, or plan on paying $30 to $60 an hour(or more) to have someone do the work for you. 

Here's my breakdown on Time and Effort:

20% - Stripping/cleaning/sanding of body, parts, frame, engine bay, and every side of every piece of metal

30% - Bodywork.  Here is where you'll find the most variation between people's projects depending on the car they started with.  Mine wasn't too bad as all my original body panels lined up pretty good to start with, but it was still an exceptionally time consuming task to get everything right.

35% - Construction(fabricating, fitting, building, painting, wiring, etc) - The fun part!

15% - Research, purchasing, driving to pickup or locate parts.

As you can, only about 1/3 of my time was spent actually putting something together.  That was a little disappointing because that's the fun part, but so much of time was instead spent doing the grunt work.  Had I known that, would I have started the project?  Hmmm........