I have been working on my fort for seven in game years now, and for the past four of them, I have been at the point where normally a player would give up and consign a fort to its demise via lag. However, with some innovation, I have had the past two years in game take less real time to play then the preceding season. The solution is that I leave dwarf fortress running all the time. In the shower, at work, while asleep, where I am does not matter as DF chugs away. Sure it may sit idle for eight of the twelve hours that I am at work due to an auto-pause, but that is four more hours of progress than I would have had otherwise. Even now while I sit at my desk at work, my dorfs labour away.
Any event that is auto-pause worthy is in need of micromanagement usually anyway (except newborns), so I don't really miss anything important. Don't really need to worry about running out of food or anything equally vital as my fortress is long since an automated machine, completely self sufficient. Were it not, I wouldn't very well be in lag-death FPS to begin with anyway. Megaprojects and other Dorfy things requiring much micromanagement to prevent cave-ins and base-jumping carpenters take longer in Dorf years, but less real life time as they can get a lot of work done with me not bothering them as they chug along at 7 fps.
So tell me bay12. Did I just make the greatest breakthrough ever, or was I just shouting off about the newest thing that people have already been doing since the dawn of time?