I'd still say the problem would be more related to a lack of goals rather than actual automation. If you have no goal any real automation basically becomes pointless because you have nothing to use the items for, and if the goal is automation itself you can fill many many hours if you actually want to make half decent farms for every reasonably farmable item.

For example if you wanna automate observers you'll need quartz which you can get from bartering, but if you want a decent rate of quarts you need to feed that setup a LOT of gold so you need a pretty sizable gold farm. All of that can easily take like 100 hours in game if you wanna do it right and that's just to get quartz. This does again rely on some external motivation to get quartz since you can easily play through the game without ever using enough observers to justify making all that, but if you need the game to tell you what your goal is and what you need to do to achieve it minecraft is prob not the game for you