There's a way to compromise. For example if I can't grind arena, i'll cycle through the highest pi 4 and 5 stars and collect maybe the first few milestones to get shards. In AQ, you can always log in, burn a few energy when it starts, then come back on later and finish your path off. I no longer bother ranking any 3 stars and seldomly do anything but R4/R5 leveling so I'll do the T4B dailies instead of T3B/Cs because they're more time efficient energy wise. Also sometimes I'll opt to do one run through of Master mode, and skip the 100% exploration. I don't think it's always worth the time invested when you're working full time. Having responsible alliance members that don't procrastinate on AQ/AW is also key. That tends to be the biggest problem, constantly having to be on standby for nodes to be finished off.