ari5323 said:
Folks,
You are kindly requested to fill out in the tracker file your "physical days"
This can give us numbers a deeper understanding in the process, and help us find patterns.
Why bother? First, we don't control anything about the process, so even if there are patterns, knowing them is pointless. Second, the process contains a strong random component (the strength of which we don't know), our data sample is small and highly unrepresentative, and factors that are local to each different processing centre will very likely overwhelm any larger pattern. Since you are only going to get a couple hundred data points (at best) that means that individual processing centres will be represented by a couple dozen -- any conclusions you draw from that will be totally specious.
And this isn't even getting into the fact that -- for routine applications -- most are probably going to be processed within a year. This compressed horizon means that there just aren't meaningful distinctions to be drawn between us.
There are three things you can do with the data: see if you are getting an AOR around the same time that people who applied concurrently with you (nice to know), see if your file is being transferred at the same time as other people, and then see if the local centre is processing everyone's file at the same rate. Any deeper analysis is just playing with numbers because it's fun, but it won't have any strength -- of course that's fine, I like playing with numbers too . . .
