Your “External Devices”

The second kind of Habit consists of all your interactions with everything directly connected to you that isn’t actually you. There are many such angles to consider, but I will highlight storage, networking, and virtualization as examples.

Storage

Modern CPUs have a series of caches, from L1 to RAM. The further away you go, the slower the speed of recall. This is loosely analogous to the human forgetting curve. For true, persistent, durable storage, we need to store our information on hard disks.

Write a lot

For humans, the most efficient form of this is writing. Therefore the habit of writing a lot helps you increase the bandwidth of everything you communicate to your future self and the outside world. This seems costly in terms of times, but remember that the speed of most algorithms is drastically improved with just a little bit of memoization and judiciously stored data structures. Even context switching becomes a lot cheaper!