Improve Unity3D performance

I have a pretty fast computer, and Unity still seems to take a very long time to process changes or import an asset. It also sits and renders for a long time in some projects behind the scene.
Here's my computer specs to help:

Ryzen 7 2700X (3.7GHZ 8 Core)
32GB Memory
Radeon Vega 64 Liquid Cooled
1TB Samsung Evo m.2 (solid state)
1000 watt power supply.

So, is there a trick to optimize Unity to utilize more cores, or speed up things somehow?
Here's what I'd like to speed up:

1. Opening a new project.
2. Rendering/Baking (I found this article I'm going to try: https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-u...apping-GI-calculation-takes-a-very-long-time-)
3. Adding an asset.
4. Generally opening Unity with an existing project.

I just want to make good use of my time, and it seems to be taking a while to open a project.

 

The first thing I do is disable "Auto Generate" in the lighting window. Then you just need to manually bake whenever you want to, instead of every little change to your scene kicking off a performance sucking background bake off.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GlobalIllumination.html

 

Most valuable tip right there

 

Antivirus / Windows Defender can also have a big impact on performance. You can add exclusions to Windows Defender (if you're using it) to tell it not to scan/monitor files in your Unity project directory.