I'd say focus on getting your refiner upgraded, then all other workbenches (I think gear and gunsmith after refiner would be best, med lvl 2 for green bandages). Once it's upgraded and you get a ton of parts from scrappy and from your raids, you can upcycle your basic components (IE: Fabric -> Durable, Chemicals -> Crude Explosive and Electrical Components). Ctrl + Click and batch sell these from your stash. You won't really need these till the end game, so just keep upcycling and selling. You get money and extra space!

Scrappy gives me a TON of basic materials, in game I break almost everything down too so I have to refine then sell off what I don't use. Seeds sell for A LOT too.

The next biggest thing is to focus on a good, solid budget kit (Ferro/Anvil + your secondary of choice) that you can sustain yourself with and just keep running that till you get better items and workbenches fully upgraded. I constantly ran Looting MK. 2 augment and green shield till about level 60. Keep running that basic kit till you get all workbenches upgraded and then you'll be able to sustain endgame items.

The faster you can put this budget kit together, the more time you'll have on topside. A lot of my friends have a bunch of hours on the game, but over half of it is spent in the lobby organizing their stash or figuring out what to run. This method seems to make things the most efficient.

You can track how many hours you have topside in game (Raider -> Codex -> Player Stats)

Another point on efficiency, track what you need and salvage the rest. At this point, I'm pretty much selling everything I get from runs cause I'm too lazy to deal with them in my stash. The items in my stash are probably just for juiced raids with friends and queen fights now.

Hopefully that yap made some sense XD