A thing that people often do in ordinary life is start a project, get partway through, and then return to it later. It seems to me that should be possible for a lot of crafting recipes - maybe all the non-cooking recipes. For some of these (e.g. blacksmithing) there would be a time and/or resource penalty associated with stopping and restarting (e.g. you have to get the forge hot again), but for others (e.g. knitting) you should be able to pause and resume the crafting clock pretty much at will.
I don’t know how hard this would be to code - I guess you’d need some kind of special partially-completed-project items - but it seems possible and I think it would be a good addition to the game, if it hasn’t already been suggested.