In general you should spend your time improving your efficiency on things that take you the longest to do. If a financial analysis take 30 hours to complete, how can you do it in 20 hours with the same (or better) level of quality and results. The 10 hours that you save will make a huge difference down the road.
You then do the same thing over and over so that you can continue to spend the bulk of your time solving the complicated problems you have to face. Suddenly you find even complicated tasks are easy enough to hand-off down the line. You look like a hero and move on to bigger and better.
Similarly, if you spend 5 minutes on a task once a week don’t automate it unless it is truly repetitive or you have free time to address it. Automation is good but putting 20 hours of development into a task that takes a total of 4 hours a year could be a bit much. That’s not to say there aren’t great reasons to do it just that you should spend your limited time wisely.
Freeing up large blocks of time lets you eventually focus on the things that take smaller blocks of time. Trickle down efficiency.