@D-rock I don't do the spreadsheet thing. There's enough tools out there so I can get buy without having to do it. ;-)
It can be a big time sync. But I think the nice thing is, you don't have to be playing to level skills. Just dump them in your queue and they train while you're away (there's even an app where you can manage your skill queue). I do put quite a lot of time into the game now, BUT I had started to get quite a bit of attention within the community on Twitch so I'm now trying to grow the viewership. However, before, I only logged in an hour or two a night (my normal gaming schedule) to putz around and do stuff.
It wasn't till I went on my first NPSI fleet (not purple, shoot it) that I got hooked and pretty much exclusively do fleet activity. In fact, our corp CEO and one of the FCs (fleet commanders) only logs in about 5 min before fleet and logs off almost immediately afterwards 1-2x a week. That's exactly how much time he puts into the game.
As far as the grind, getting an income in game is annoying. There are things you can put a few hours a month into to get a few billion isk banked and then you can live on that for awhile. I personally don't fly expensive ships so the few hours a month PVE activity keeps me going. It also helps people gift me ships and in game money via my streams as well and that helps supplement.
If you want to give it a go, let me know. I mean, you can do quite a lot with a free account to see if you like it.
@FreeOnes_Adam there's only a few instances in the game where you have to log in and do something or lose it. That's mostly a pretty high level of play. Like if you have a structure you have to fuel... You're not going to lose anything unless you had it in a player structure that got blown up. I mean, Anders logged in after 5 years and all his shit was still there. You can even log off in space and it's fine (mind, logging back in could be interesting depending on WHERE you logged out in space).
Best thing to do is install it and give it a go. You can do quite a lot with a free account and if you play in potato mode it works fine of older PC's. You can do quite a bit solo too, though going out with a fleet and blowing people up is always fun. ;-)