Releasing an average of one publication each working day, collecting information from 280 000 households in South Africa's largest sample survey, and preparing for the first labour force survey of 2007 should be enough of a challenge for any organisation.
Yet Statistics SA, South Africa's official statistics agency, undertook this in the month of February at the same time as maintaining its regular monthly collection of output and price data for sectors as diverse as manufacturing, mining, wholesale and retail trade, electricity, construction and motor trade sales.
On Tuesday the agency released the latest gross domestic product (GDP) data for the fourth quarter of 2006, as well as estimates for the year as a whole. This showed that the seasonally adjusted real GDP at market prices for the fourth quarter increased by an annualised rate of 5.6 percent from the third quarter.
For 2006 as a whole, real GDP increased by 5 percent year on year, after a 5.1 percent increase in 2005.
The main contributors to the increase in economic activity for the fourth quarter were manufacturing (1.4 percentage points); finance, real estate and business services (1.4 percentage points); wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants (0.8 percentage points); and transport, storage and communication (0.5 percentage points).
Agriculture, forestry and fishing reflected negative growth in this quarter, and reduced the growth figure by 0.2 percentage points, while the electricity, gas and water industry did not contribute anything to economic growth in this quarter.
The impact on growth is influenced by each industry's relative size.
Finance, real estate and business services - 19.
Manufacturing - 16.
Wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants - 14.
General government services - 12.7 percent.
At the other end of the scale, agriculture, forestry and fishing accounted for just 2.1 percent of GDP, so the impact of its 8.4 percent decline in the fourth quarter was limited because of the industry's relatively small size.
Conversely, the industry that grew the most last year was construction, with 13.3 percent growth from 2005 to 2006. However, this contributed just 0.4 percentage points to total economic growth of 5 percent for the year.
This apparent anomaly is explained by the relatively small size of the construction industry as a percentage of the total economy (2.8 percent for the year as a whole, and 3 percent in the fourth quarter).
In terms of value-added growth for the fourth quarter of 2006, the primary sector (mainly agriculture and mining) contributed just 1.1 percent, compared with 8.4 percent by the secondary sector and 5.3 percent by the tertiary sector.
Looking back over time, the latest GDP data show that real annual growth in all industries excluding agriculture for 2006 was 5.4 percent, the highest since 1980 when it was 6 percent. In addition, total quarterly growth of 5.6 percent represented the 33rd consecutive increase in South Africa's GDP.
Last week Stats SA also reported that the year-on-year increase in the headline consumer price index (CPI) in January was 6 percent. The annual change in CPIX, the monetary policy inflation target measure, which excludes mortgage rates, was 5.3 percent in January.
In the same week, it was reported that the annual increase in the producer price index (PPI) was 9.8 percent in January 2007. This was 0.5 percentage points higher than the corresponding annual rate of 9.3 percent at December 2006.
The engine room of official statistics, which drives the whole statistical cycle from collection of information to publication of data, can never stop - not for routine maintenance, not for a vacation.
As these latest key economic indicators were reported, Stats SA was collecting and processing the data for the next round of monthly price reports (the CPI and PPI for February), while its national accounts component was already analysing and integrating preliminary data for estimation of GDP during the first two months of 2007.