Is being helpful more trouble than its worth?

After a particular heavy day at work it got me thinking about workloads and the time it was taking to do some tasks in comparison to my colleagues. I work in a team of 7 where there are varying degrees of knowledge. A working day is pretty flexible and there are no specific tasks, apart from one day a week where an individual aids the support department with operating system and hardware calls. However, different individuals treat some of these problems with different attitudes and whilst I may spend up to 30 minutes(or alot more) trying to find the cause of a problem, others may just reboot the server and close the call. Obviously, this can lead to a problem(for me), especially if the problem reoccurs on a day where I'm assisting support. I've lost count of the number of memory leaks or configuration changes I've made after spending the time to understand and diagnose a problem that otherwise seems to have been bouncing around support for days or maybe months.

It then got me thinking about how often my phone rings during the day. Because I actually spend time diagnosing problems it gives me a greater understanding of how things work and therefore better placed to answer specific configuration or scalability questions. I also have a good memory which means throughout the day I am asked what is the IP address of this or how is this set up etc. Answering these questions actually further cements this into memory and the circle continues!

I have lots of ideas of how to improve things but a lot of these need time to be researched and implemented properly. However, I feel as though I spend the majority of my time helping others with their problems or answering questions to things that have been said and documented hundreds of times before!

I love working in IT but some days I feel like I haven't done anything because I have spent more time helping others than doing any tangible work myself. It does sometimes make you think, what is the incentive to be helpful and do a good job? The people at the top are blind to this because its not quantifiable, ie spending 60 minutes now to understand something can save you a lot of time in the future.

It's always easier to ask the guy with the good memory, than to spend some time finding out something for yourself. I'm sure this is true for almost every profession.