MB..
Do us all a favor and put a watch on it.... your 4-5 seconds may in fact be 30- 40 seconds.. x 12= 6-8 minutes/day x 5= 30-40 minutes/week..... x 50 =25-30 hours/ year x $40= $1000-1200/ year in your lost productivity... When your working with a crane and crew its not only your time at stake, it could $150-500/hr at issue... That could make it as high as $15,000/year in lost productivity....
If it actually takes an average of 1 minute longer to untie and retie your hitch, than to unclip and reclip a spliced eye, that could be 20k/year in lost productivity....
And its not just money at stake... working faster and more efficiently also makes it safer, much safer....
Now how many other repeptitive actions could you tweak to increase speed and efficiency.... save a minute or two every time you gas and oil the saws... or a few seconds using loopies to tie off every limb to be lowerred, a minute every time you bag or box a rope rather than wrapping it up.... using a whoopie sling, or folding cube, or velcro climber pads etc.... All those seconds add up BIG TIME!!!
PS.. After Isabel a little bitty 20 ton crane crew could easily pull in 8K/day for the first couple of weeks... That is $1,000/hr.
PPS... the day before I left Virginia, I referred a tree removal job to a guy I had talked to on the phone a while back... I stopped by the job to meet him, where he told me that a guy got killed when working for him. It was a new guy who shouldn't have been climbing.... The company used split tails with the blake hitch, no spliced eye..... The climber's anchor hitch to the biner failed and he fell backwards from 50' and landed on his head...
An $18 SPLICED EYE COULD HAVE SAVED A LOT MORE THAN A FEW SECONDS TO TIE AND UNTIE THAT ANCHOR HITCH!!!