OK this post may make a lot of people say, "DUH!" but this really was groundbreaking for me (pun intended). After some advice from 
So here is what I figured out. Wait for it... here comes the epiphany... you need to produce enough resources per hour to cover the hourly costs of harvesting a desired resource! I'll wait for everyone to recover from that mind blowing realization.
OK we are back. For the longest time, I didn't look at the hourly production. I simply just put my best cards on the "best" pieces of land. That worked great when the game first began. I put my best cards on my SPS producing occupied land and the Magic Research producing land. The rest were Grain farms that fed those plots. It was glorious!
But I never made any adjustments after Wood, Stone and Iron were introduced. So my plots became incredibly inefficient. My SPS plot continued to have all of my Gold Alpha cards (yeah I know, poor me) which lead to huge production but also huge resource requirements to harvest it. I simply could not keep up.
So my solution needed to be two-fold. Because there was nothing I could do to increase production of grain, wood, stone and iron, I had to first lower the production (and resource requirement for harvest) of SPS. So I took my best cards off of that plot. I put those Gold Alpha cards on the resource I (and everyone) needs the most: Grain. I then moved some good , but not the best, cards to the SPS plot. Here are the requirements after that move:
So now if I want to harvest SPS every week, I need to make sure I am producing 142.045 extra grain every hour. So I need enough grain per hour to harvest the wood, stone and iron I need plus 142.045 left over to harvest the SPS. I have that. Great!
I also need 71.023 Wood per hour and 28.409 Stone per hour. I have way more than enough of those. Awesome!
Now here is the problem. I need 7.102 Iron per hour. I have only 1 iron plot and until yesterday that was only producing about 4 Iron per hour. So I had a choice. I could either produce less SPS (thus decreasing the need for Iron) or I could produce more iron. Luckily after moving cards from SPS to Grain plots, I had freed up some good cards. So I put those on the Iron plot. It still came up just short so I removed a card from a surplus Stone plot and am putting it on Iron tomorrow.
After I swap out that card my production of Iron will increase enough so that I will be able to cover the 7.102 of Iron per hour required to harvest the SPS.
So here's a summary. I had to lower my SPS production. You would think "make number go up" is always the best case, but not if you can't harvest it. I was making about 450 SPS a week after taxes... but I could never harvest it in one week. It was taking me two weeks to harvest it and that involved a ton of time moving things around. It also involved me having to spend DEC to top off the needed resources. So I was really only getting around 100 SPS per week and I was spending way too much time getting it. After this adjustment, I will harvest 194.38 SPS per week and I will only have to make 1 swap and 2 transfers to do it. I will also be able to sell excess Stone for about 650 DEC a week.
My management is still not perfect. First of all, I don't have enough grain to harvest all of my Stone. As a result, my best Stone plot is being wasted.
Second, I still do not understand Aura at all. There is a chance that I would be better off switching my SPS production to Aura. I would get the same 100% boost for Aura production that I am currently getting for SPS production. I have the required research to build and Aura Lab. I also have 1800 vouchers which are needed for production.
So should I switch my SPS production to Aura production?