Developing processes to replace routine actions takes considerably longer than just doing the action any individual time.

The first crack at developing processes will generally be unclear, run poorly, and be missing serious amounts of stuff you take for granted, but which are non-obvious for someone other than yourself.

(Heck, it'd probably be difficult for you to run your own first version of the process verbatim without improvising.)

At some point, you have to develop processes to move forwards. If you keep doing the same repeatable work once you've stopped improving at it, you can't move your time up the ladder of value towards higher productivity, higher creativity, and more impactful actions.

But most people don't factor that; they look at raw short-term efficiency, and making processes is almost never a smart short-term efficiency. Long-term? Absolutely. Mid-term? Possibly. Short-term? Probably not.

The right time to do this, of course, is before you're booked 110% and totally overwhelmed. Once you see your commitments at 80% to 90% of your time, it's a good alert to start freeing that time back up.

But it takes some discipline, since it's never the most urgent thing to do. And that's why most people don't do it, and wind up getting stuck.