When I work with cycles directly from the rendered viewport it gets kinda slow because my computer is not very powerful. I understand that won't matter too much if I just wait a bit longer for it to render or minimize it's use. I'd like to know if there's anything that could be done to imporove the sampling speed a bit?
You may want to try using Ctrl+B to preview a small area at a time rather than the whole screen. Also, if you have denoising on, set the start sample to whatever you have the viewport sample count at. Lastly, head down to the Performance > Viewport options and increase the Pixel Size.
Hope that helps!