an unexpected time-consumer

Wow.  After I finished with cataloguing the sounds coming out of my characters' mouths, I thought I'd be through with that intensely specific sort of work for my pre-production phase.  Wrong.  Something I'd brushed off as being a quick half-day's worth of work is turning into the most important phase of the production yet.  That something is the timing of everything.  It includes the mouth movements, sure, but goes beyond that to everything from practical movements (he reaches, he turns his head, etc.) to character-revealing movements (he shrugs, he droops), even to pauses.  It all needs to be timed and mapped out, each thing relative to the next, so that when I get to the editing phase I'm not confronted with narration and animation going at two very different paces.  I thought this would be easy, and the parts with lots of dialogue are, but when a shot is mostly silent and relies heavily on physical characterization, it's crazy.  I need to know exactly what actions occur, and their exact order.  Even the twitch of an arm.  I've been sitting at my computer with headphones on, listening to the audio, then closing my eyes and using a stopwatch to time all the actions playing out in my head.  Those stopwatch times then need to be converted into frame numbers and added to the log.  It's ridiculous.