When it comes to leveraging a new feature or adopting a new technique, whether that happens tomorrow or months down the road also depends on if I'm currently working on new development or maintaining a legacy system with multiple team members. Whenever I start a new project; that's when I'll leverage something like a standardized naming convention or columnstore indexes for the first time.

Some features like table compression or filtered indexes can offer an immediate improvement for a legacy database that's low risk and doesn't require coordination with other team members (just notification).