In a Twitter post today on @animalcrossing , they said that they would support cloud saves. I think this might make running the game more accessible, once they roll out the save data transfer feature later this fall.
Many have expressed the same interest as you, and I agree that it is unfortunate that we can't play casually and run at the same time. Hopefully this issue will be resolved with the new features.
There's also the option o homebrewing your switch and extracting your save file that way, but I'm not how comfortable you are with softmodding (I've never done it so I can't speak from experience)