Also, should I be making work orders with the manager interface? How exactly does that work?
If you want tons of an item, but only a specific number, the manager is a pretty handy thing to use (i.e. I need 300 blocks to finish this tower.)
Anyway, hit 'j' to bring up the jobs screen, then hit 'm' to bring up the new jobs queue. Press 'q' here and you'll bring up a screen where you can type in stuff to narrow down what you want to queue- blocks, for instance. So type in 'blocks' and use the arrow keys to select the material you want to make them from (rock, specific metals, glass, wood, etc.)
Once you have it highlighted hit Enter and you'll be prompted to enter a quantity. You can type in any two digit number, but if it's higher than 30 it'll just be truncated to 30.
Now that we've got an order queued up, we need a manager to verify it. If you don't have one, go to the 'n'obles screen and assign one- he'll need an office, but it doesn't have to be anything but a 1x2 rock chair and table. Assuming he's not doing anything else, he'll go to his office to verify the orders and jobs at the appropriate workshops will be queued- as far as I can tell they're distributed evenly in number to the proper workshops but I'm not certain, so don't take that as gospel. If you want more than 30 of a given item you'll have to do this multiple times.