Extra time put in developing schedules

consider the alternative no work at all. 

There is a misconception among some schedulers that to track activity progress long duration activities must be divided into many segments.  This is a common cause for excessive number of activities to be updated.

If the activity is a duration type such as concrete curing then by reporting elapsed duration then progress is correctly assessed.   But progress of most activities is related to physical volume of work.  If the activity is productivity type then by reporting production then progress is correctly assessed.  Remaining duration will be calculated taking into consideration activity production rate and remaining volume of work.

Activity durations shall be dictated by what it takes for a better schedule:

• most of the time contiguous work is the way to go,
• at times activity splitting creates undesired results when resource leveling spread apart activity segments that must be performed contiguous,
• at times splitting the activity is necessary to get lower duration schedules when considering resource leveling.

Unfortunately this is not well understood by many of those who claim they have the absolute knowledge and embed it into the infamous “Best Practices” that prohibit what otherwise would be BETTER than "Best Practice”.

Only a few among available CPM software provides for production type activities as Spider Project does, for decades it has been embedded in linear scheduling models.  Not surprisingly in linear scheduling model many activities are of long duration.

Linear Scheduling Method

Linear schedules can be modeled using SS+lag and FF+lag between overlapped activities activities, even if your software does not provide for productivity type activities.