There's a number of options to speed up your Sitecore development installation:

1. Disable the indexes. Indexes are responsible for the little search bar in Sitecore taskbar. If you can happily live without it, then comment out the <indexes> section inside your database section in web.config (that is most probably /databases/master/indexes). The search will go away, along with index updates on each item create/update/delete operation.

2. Switch your site to the 'live' mode. Live mode completely eliminates the need for publishing, which can be pretty annoying in development scenarios, by taking all items directly from the content authoring database. To activate find your website in <sites> section of web.config (the site is called 'website' by default) and change database="web" to database="master". This is the way Sitecore client site works on core database. Naturally, by switching the publishing off you also lose the publishing restrictions, that is 'do not publish'/'publish date' stuff.