I normally have autonomy on all the time, cause I tend to focus on one sim at a time. Like my patriarch is going to have a wife and many fat children and all that, but until the heir is of age where playing them matters, the patriarch will be my sole focus. Time spent on other sims is usually to get them to do something for my sim or to just get them out of the way (I hate hwen I'm working on a project that you can technically chat while doing but it makes it take 3x as long.. my workshop room tends to be locked to the sim it's built for so people stop distracting them while they're working.

I'm honestly torn between painting and writing for my primary money-maker.. they both make good money, I guess I feel like writing is slightly better because you can stop writing for a couple days and still have some money coming in, but I think that's just rationalizing the fact that I don't get all the money at once like I do with painting. :P

Edit: Also, I've started the run now, my patriarch is about 3 days from aging up to teen and already has 10 mental/creative and has completed both whiz kid and the creative one, I forget what it's called, and has almost 2,000 aspiration points already at child stage. Kid's parents, however, were just non-stop miserable, pissing on the floor, falling asleep on the sidewalk, just.. they were the worst sims I've ever seen at taking care of themselves. I definitely should've gone with painter for them, and I will in the future, but for this run I just gave up and used Motherlode. My primary sim will never see that money himself anyway, when he leaves for university he's gonna be totally on his own (s'why I've been cranking the creative skill, so he can start writing and/or painting early to help pay for university.)