These 5 small tweaks made my self-hosted LLM setup way more productive

Productivity gains from self-hosted LLM setups come more from workflow improvements than hardware upgrades. Five key tweaks made a significant difference: maintaining persistent context files instead of starting fresh each session, using reusable prompt templates, setting up a local RAG system over personal notes and files, integrating the LLM into existing tools like Logseq, Home Assistant, and VS Code, and stopping constant model-hopping in favor of a stable set of reliable models. The core insight is that most productivity problems are workflow problems, not model problems.