Hi!
I just wanted to post this experience with the hope that someone else will find it useful as well. I'm always looking to maximize my time and so I'm always looking for productivity hacks. Time blocking (The ONE Thing), Pomodoro technique, scheduling your day in advance etc.
But what I didn't realize is, if you use a computer like I do to earn a living/make money, there is one (well 2) thing(s) you can do to increase your productivity 10 fold. OK, that may be a slight over exaggeration but it's a whole hell of a lot and probably not too far off. Read on.
If you find yourself having to wait for your applications to open, close, or just do their thing you know It can be, at the very least, annoying to completely frustrating. Case in point, I'm a programmer and I'm developing a game in Unity3D (this could apply to almost anything though, FireFox, Photoshop etc). My workflow looks like this, do stuff in Unity or maybe coding in Rider (by JetBrains +1000!) then I have to wait for it to compile or if I play test I have to wait for Unity to start. This can take a fair amount of time even with a beast of a machine like I have and if you multiply that out by the number of times I have to do that and you can see how that can add up in lost productivity. Not to mention lost productivity from unplanned restarts to free up memory or if an application crashes or hangs.
Mind you, I use the shit out of my machine. I have dozens of tabs open in multiple browsers (12 tabs alone just for the FLF ;-) ), Excel open, multiple IDEs open etc etc. So it gets a workout. To some, what I'm going to tell you is obvious and well, I knew the solution all along but like the death from a thousand cuts, I didn't realize I was bleeding time until it finally dawned on me that I needed to do something about it.
The solution? Get and install an SSD drive. But no ordinary SSD, you need to get (if your machine supports it), M.2 NVME SSD drive. In my case I bought the 1TB Samsung 970 EVO. Holy Sh*t!! This thing is fast. How fast is it? It's so fast that it has the ability to go back in time. It has the ability to create a wormhole under my desk.
Seriously though, from a cold boot to Windows screen, including the slow human typing in the password is < 25 secs. Waking from sleep is like instant on. I also added an additional 16 Gb of ram for a total of 32 Gb. This relieved the memory pressure due to my browser stomping usage.
TL;DR Get and install an M.2 NVME SSD drive and add more ram if your machine supports it. But for the record this isn't for the faint of heart. If you don't know hardware have someone who does do this for you. Done incorrectly could result in lost data etc. Proceed at own risk. Ok, enough disclaimers.
Now I know laptops rival this but not all laptops have M.2 drives. They can and do use SATA SSD drives. SATA is a slower technology but they are faster than standard hard drives. However, they are at least 5 times slower than most M.2 NVME drives. But if your machine doesn't support NVME you can always look at SATA SSD drives and you'll get a nice performance boost so time saved and productivity still increased.
If anyone cares to share how they've used technology to save themselves time or increase productivity by all means list it here. Doesn't have to be hardware based. Cheers!
I just wanted to post this experience with the hope that someone else will find it useful as well. I'm always looking to maximize my time and so I'm always looking for productivity hacks. Time blocking (The ONE Thing), Pomodoro technique, scheduling your day in advance etc.
But what I didn't realize is, if you use a computer like I do to earn a living/make money, there is one (well 2) thing(s) you can do to increase your productivity 10 fold. OK, that may be a slight over exaggeration but it's a whole hell of a lot and probably not too far off. Read on.
If you find yourself having to wait for your applications to open, close, or just do their thing you know It can be, at the very least, annoying to completely frustrating. Case in point, I'm a programmer and I'm developing a game in Unity3D (this could apply to almost anything though, FireFox, Photoshop etc). My workflow looks like this, do stuff in Unity or maybe coding in Rider (by JetBrains +1000!) then I have to wait for it to compile or if I play test I have to wait for Unity to start. This can take a fair amount of time even with a beast of a machine like I have and if you multiply that out by the number of times I have to do that and you can see how that can add up in lost productivity. Not to mention lost productivity from unplanned restarts to free up memory or if an application crashes or hangs.
Mind you, I use the shit out of my machine. I have dozens of tabs open in multiple browsers (12 tabs alone just for the FLF ;-) ), Excel open, multiple IDEs open etc etc. So it gets a workout. To some, what I'm going to tell you is obvious and well, I knew the solution all along but like the death from a thousand cuts, I didn't realize I was bleeding time until it finally dawned on me that I needed to do something about it.
The solution? Get and install an SSD drive. But no ordinary SSD, you need to get (if your machine supports it), M.2 NVME SSD drive. In my case I bought the 1TB Samsung 970 EVO. Holy Sh*t!! This thing is fast. How fast is it? It's so fast that it has the ability to go back in time. It has the ability to create a wormhole under my desk.
Seriously though, from a cold boot to Windows screen, including the slow human typing in the password is < 25 secs. Waking from sleep is like instant on. I also added an additional 16 Gb of ram for a total of 32 Gb. This relieved the memory pressure due to my browser stomping usage.
TL;DR Get and install an M.2 NVME SSD drive and add more ram if your machine supports it. But for the record this isn't for the faint of heart. If you don't know hardware have someone who does do this for you. Done incorrectly could result in lost data etc. Proceed at own risk. Ok, enough disclaimers.
Now I know laptops rival this but not all laptops have M.2 drives. They can and do use SATA SSD drives. SATA is a slower technology but they are faster than standard hard drives. However, they are at least 5 times slower than most M.2 NVME drives. But if your machine doesn't support NVME you can always look at SATA SSD drives and you'll get a nice performance boost so time saved and productivity still increased.
If anyone cares to share how they've used technology to save themselves time or increase productivity by all means list it here. Doesn't have to be hardware based. Cheers!
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