How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save?
Based on an xkcd comic
Your time is more valuable when you work a lot and have little free time. The value below multiplies the base monetary value by the ratio of work hours to free hours.
Strategies to consider when optimizing routine tasks.
There's keyboard shortcuts that anyone could benefit from. You don't have to be a programmer or a video editor to save time with shortcuts. Even something as simple as Ctrl + Backspace to delete a whole word at once will add up over time.
Using snippets when coding can save a lot of time. I have a snippet for every import I commonly use and also for things like creating a skeleton of a React component.
Of course this depends heavily on which software you work in. There's Emmet, which is a well-known extension, but my favorite is Jumpy, which I can use to quickly jump to a different place in the text. Vim has a lot of "motions" that you can use for the purpose of jumping around quickly in the text but Jumpy provides a single quick shortcut to achieve 90% of the motions you could want.
Yes, even something as radical as buying a new computer makes sense. The math checks out. You have to load something literally hundreds of times a day and savings of a couple seconds each time adds up quickly.
An average computer should last you at least 3 years. Over that period, 1 second savings 100 times a day at $30 an hour gives you $900 to spend. Can you get a better computer that achieves that saving for that amount of money? I know that I could but if you're already on the latest generation you might not.