1. Not a list but a general piece of advice: Learn the appropriate automation techniques for whatever you are doing. I’ve seen people spend a lot of time manually renaming large numbers of files or manually resizing images, when they could do it in 10 seconds using a command line on any modern operating system.
Depending on what you’re doing, this might involve learning a small amount of Bourne Shell, Microsoft’s batch language, VBA, AppleScript, SPSS’s command syntax, Emacs Lisp, or just more Excel macros. The key thing is that all of these provide ways do iteration or aggregate operations over groups of things, which means that you can work with increasing amounts of data without expending additional work.
2. A very common cause of computers eventually becoming so slow they almost grind to a halt is viruses, spyware or other malware. So either protect yourself by using antivirus and anti-spyware software, or use an operating system such as Linux which tends not to suffer from virus and spyware problems. And always keep your software up to date, because antivirus software is not a magic bullet (and neither is Linux's security).
Also, don't install dodgy software, especially if you downloaded it from a filesharing network like BitTorrent.
3.
1. Make backups.
2. Be sure your backups work and can be restored from.
This is probably the best time saver :)
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