Yeah, but most of us don't have the luxury of being able to claim that ripping and encoding our CDs is a valid use of our employers' time.

I prefer the batch approach - ripping and encoding a manageable number and ensuring that the tags are correct. I've found that tagging is the biggest holdup in the whole process, as it is impossible to know for any given CD how accurate CDDB data is. Some CDs have been perfect, others pretty bad, so all of the CDs need to be checked. The ripping and encoding itself is pretty smooth - just rip away for as long as you have time to swap CDs and then let the encoding happen overnight.