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There are three relatively simple (ie mechanistic) skills I know of that seem to make big qualitative shifts in people's output. They can be divided into input, processing, and output. They are info triage, note taking, and touch typing.
Each of them can improve substantially with only limited practice time but often get brushed off bc they seem like minor efficiency improvements rather than qualitative ones, but what we know from creativity research is that quantity past a certain threshold turns into quality.
Some intuition pumps for the various skills. For info triage, the are at least four levels of reading things and it pays hugely to practice the ones you haven't done much of. They are regular, close with notes, spot checking value/claims, and skimming.
For note taking, any delay down to milliseconds makes it function much worse as a working memory aid. So, hot key based and burned into muscle memory to get the full benefit. Speed takes priority over organization.
A good note taking system automates some of the benefits of the pedagogical principle of connecting things to your existing knowledge graph, along with making it subsequently easier to teach others, which also has large personal effects.
Touch typing might seem mundane, but the math on time saved over a lifetime alone render it a good investment, and that's ignoring the boost in output you get when perceived effort of dashing off quick notes and emails goes down.
Writing closer to the speed on speech has surprising threshold effects, along with another virtuous cycle of making you better at communication in general via higher practice volume, leading to finding it more pleasant etc. /thread