for me, optimizing my {workflow,environment} is cathartic. making my setup visually appealing and working the way that's best for me helps me improve. it's an iterative process. if i dont try out new tools and evaluate new methodologies i cant accurately gauge what works best for me.

on top of that thought and experience activities where you force yourself out of your normal comfort zone can give you better perspective. things like our "week in the tty" challenge. i had considered myself a shell user until the 1st time i tried it. i realized how much i relied on things like xsel to jump-gap my clipboard between applications. after a few days w/o using x i gained new powers i didnt realize i "needed". now when i connect to a remote or headless box i'm much more agile and able to work w/o relying on applications i have locally. that being said, it also shows me how far {i,we}'ve come and how much i love tools in my kit.

when i first, seriously, decided to switch from {gui,ide like} editors to vi{m,} my guru z3bra gave me some sage like advice. "learn to use vanilla vi first. once you master the basics everything else will be a natural extension of it's capabilities" <i paraphrased him>. i was naive and didn't fully grok what he meant at first. but after years i've finally started to become enlightened to his wisdom. fast forward to the present my vimrc has changed quite a bit. and i use neovim locally with a bunch of plugins. the features i've added to the editor are lovely and help me a lot for my work. but none of them are "necessary" to me getting things done. now when using vi on an ancient server somewhere i still feel right at home. sure, it's not as "flashy" but as a tool it works just how i expect it to.

speaking of aesthetics; for me, having "good colors" is very important. i read better w/ light on dark colorschemes. for things like your gkt theme and terminal colors this can be achieved w/ relative ease. but for the web it's not so easy. i spend a decent amount of time using the same websites both at home and at work. so taking the time to write css overrides for those sites to make them match my color schemes is worth it to me. there's nothing worse that going to a site and being blinded by some neon white bg. the same is true with distilling visual information. i like to {remove,hide} entire sections of sites to help me focus on only the content i care about (e.g. make reddit more like lobsters).

now, to the actual topic of this post :P

i have a variety of shell scripts in my ~/bin folder that i use all the time. but they mostly just help me automate tasks i cant be bothered to remember to do manually. things like {dis,en}abling my touchpad or discrete graphics cart on my laptop, interacting w/ remote {pastebin,shortlink} services, or just fun stuff like processing and displaying terminal {ascii,ansi} art.

my real productivity enhancements have come from optimizing my toolchain and workflow.