Suggestion: When using automation, the game should check to see if something higher-priority has become available after each attempt at its current task. At the moment, once it starts doing something it will keep doing it until it can't continue, which results in eg. collecting way more wood than is necessary.
If it rechecked after each iteration then you could just set the task that uses the wood to higher priority and it would stop gathering wood once it had enough to do that.