How can I SPEED UP my EXPORT times?

Final Cut Pro X supports GPU-accelerated exporting to H.264 which is something Pr and AME do not currently support. That being said, you can still improve your export times by exporting to an intermediate format first, like ProRes 422, then convert that to H.264. An easy way to do this would be to set up a Watch Folder in AME to encode anything that gets put there to the YouTube HD preset automatically. Then you would Queue your ProRes job to AME and have it output to the Watch Folder.

The reason exporting to ProRes would be faster than H.264 is because H.264 is a highly compressed format that requires a lot of processing power to encode a high quality at a small file size. ProRes is easier to encode to (at the expense of a significantly larger file), and when you're flatting effects, color correction, and other things such as speed ramps you'll see a sizable speed increase. Then when you have that ProRes file with all of your effects flattened, it will be much easier to convert to H.264.

Do a test of how long it takes to export directly to H.264, then another for exporting to ProRes then converting that to H.264. The latter should be faster, but even if it isn't it much faster, it will free up machine resources so you can continue working while exporting in the background.