When I am not doing a few local levels for a short period of time and I just need to grind craft, I turn on a movie or watch TV because there is no reason to actually pay attention to the "mini-game" I can just listen for the audio cues and glance over at the computer screen to see how I am doing.

If I am not watching something, I end up falling a sleep while crafting.

I really wish the game was more interesting. This may be a bad example, but a mini game like in BioShock would be more interesting because it is still timed and over time you have to get better at the mini-game because it continues to add extra elements that make the game harder. You are constantly doing actions instead of waiting for long animations to play. I do like the animations, but they need to be less than a second and go to the next action.

There we go we need a crafting system that is action packed kind of like the Disciplines of War classes.