For me, as a Chinese Canadian, English is obviously not my native language. I spend probably two or three times more than my colleagues do writing applications. It takes a lot of time. If I want to write a single $120,000-per-year grant, it takes me probably at least three weeks to prepare the whole grant application, which is really a lot of time.
Grants are so important to my lab, particularly the operating grants. The reason is that they allow us to hire graduate students, post-doctoral students, which has a major impact on training the future generation of scientists. It takes lots of time to do it.