Lean startups, the idea behind rails, most business books, and tons of other literature is basically just saying:

“Spend as much time as possible on what you are doing that is unique.”

It’s easy to forget this. I think it’s worthwhile to, at least once a week, have a retrospective where the entire team thinks about what they focused on over the past week that wasn’t unique to the problem the company is trying to solve. Once all those things are on the table, everyone can figure out ways to make it so that they don’t have to focus on those things.

E.g. Spending too much time on e-mail servers? Use sendgrid.

Spending too much time deploying? Use heroku.

Spending too much time managing someone? Setup a learning plan for them.

Spending too much time debugging? Make the code clearer.

Spending too much time arguing? Agree on a few core principles and then refer to them.

Spending too much time speculating? Find an expert and ask them. Go direct.

Etc.