There seems to be a lot of effort to remove day to day time wasters in small things.

Then, if you think about it, having subpar teammates is also a waste of time. They are not only wasting their own time but also everybody elses. So making sure you don't let people with IQ less than certain threshold is also important for everybodys productivity.

Solving a problem once is extremely important. Instead of reinventing infrastructure for each and every project at the company as many companies do (mine, one of the largest banks in the world, in my team there are still people who are devoted to maintaining a handful of servers running Windows -- including completely custom everything from project structure, to build, to configuration mechanisms, everything reinvented for the project). Solving a problem once also means you can focus on a single problem because you are solving this problem for an entire company.

If you do Agile right you get to the part at the core of the process where you mercilessly optimize your process. I think most companies talk about Agile where Google is one of the very few that actually do it.