When you describe your technology stack, from the bottom to the top layer: hardware, OS, middleware and application - with their respective configurations - it is easy to notice that as we go up in the stack, more frequent are the changes. Your hardware will hardly change, your operating system has a long life cycle and your middleware will keep up with applications needs, the element the most changes, even if your release cycle is long (weeks or months), applications will be the volatile.
In "The Practice of System and Network Administration", the authors categorize the biggest "time sinkholes" in IT as: manual/non-standard provisioning of Operating Systems and application deployments. These time sink holes will consume your time, with either repetitive tasks or unplanned work.