I've found great utility in studying parallel computing, both professionally and personally; while the former makes me money very directly, the latter enables me to operate well enough to make use of my intellectual knowledge, and arguably, is more important, being transferable
parallel computing best practices transfer to our lives:
break tasks down to their smallest logical units, but no further.
seek out and eliminate needless dependencies.
be mindful of interruptions and context switching.
schedule similar tasks together.
optimize for concurrency.