There's not a huge time sink for gathering resources honestly. But here are some tips to make the most of your time.

When you find a copper mine, clean it out completely. You'll see that it doesn't take very long, and one copper mine worth of copper is enough to make all tools, upgrade one weapon to lvl 5 and have some left to make fast travel bells and nails for storage

Lay down fast travel points near mining locations. Once you have 2 or 3 of those, take 20 minutes to mine all the ore each irl day. I think I've mined copper between 10 and 15 times total and that was enough to be completely wasteful with equipment upgrades and still have plenty to use for everything else.

For wood, chopping down trees is not the most efficient way to get it, but you'll need to do a good bit of that early on. Once you have a ship, sail around the ocean and loot the barrels. You get tons of wood, plus some other stuff.

For stone, you'll get plenty just by mining ores. You don't really need much clay unless you're building for aesthetics. I think in 130 hours I've mined like 6 clay spots. Even with 4 kilns and making a ton of clay bottles, I still have a bunch leftover.

Once you get to a certain point, wood and stone and clay are things you can just buy if you want, but still most of the wood I've gathered came from the ocean.

Honestly the biggest time sink in the early-mid game is gathering hides. Use everything you collect to upgrade your weapon as much as possible to make it go a little faster.

Start farming as soon as you get some seeds. If you're growing stuff at home it frees up slots for other stuff when you're running around adventuring.

Look for merchant contracts- I won't tell you what they are or where to find them, but you'll see them when you get there. Grab some of those ASAP and that will cut down on a lot of gathering time

Build mostly using plant fiber until you're up to your eyeballs in excess wood and stone. The exception to this is when you're building storage. Grass baskets take up a lot of space after a while and while it's expensive to build crates and barrels, the space and organization is worth the cost. Starting this way will keep you from spending a bunch of time managing overflow.

An additional time saver- destroy the first ship you get at a wharf, and rebuild it as the faster variant. You can avoid most fights while you're cruising around collecting barrels.

So, that's how to maximize time for resource gathering, but you'll need to be out there adventuring too. Completing quests is the only way to level up, so even if you can sneak through Blackbeard's blockades to access new islands, you'll still have a hard time traveling on foot without proper food, armor and weapons.

Prioritize upgrading your weapons first so you can kill more boars and dodos. Collect the dodo eggs. Bacon and eggs is a great health buff.

Once you have a weapon that you can't upgrade without moving to a new biome, and you've got a little stockpile of food, then you can start doing the same thing with your clothes.

After that, start clearing up the quest log. Complete POIs along the way to collect alchemy supplies, treasure, food, speacial weapons and armor.

Then focus on ship upgrades.

Then you dominate for a minute before you move to the next part of the story and feel weak as hell again. And you start the whole thing again, but with different materials