Day cycle
In The Shipyard, a day is broken into a morning and evening phase.
Morning
In the morning phase, you assign available yardies to work on projects (build, gather resources, operate a machine)
Evening
In the evening, you see the results of today's work (resources produced, buildings completed) and deal with anything that happened on the shipyard today.
You can also talk to the advisors in the loft to start quests. You can spend any tech points available.