If you have limited training time the best thing you could do is ride harder during your limited time and cut out any junk miles - enough time to warmup and go hard and just enough time to cool down and off the bike. No need to spend any money.

"will compact cranks help?? "

They will help on the hills. At least they do for me. I'm a natural spinner so the compacts almost seem custom made for me. I'll never go back. But - as pointed out, there is no substitute for training.

The only way compact cranks will make you faster is if you easiest to pedal gear is not easy enough. If you have a 39/ 23 and rarely use the 23 you don't need compacts. For your area a 39/25 should get you most anywhere you want. If you live in 1000 foot climbs can happen fairly often get them.

Hey G-Man, I agree with what you say, except to point out that in a tri getting up something is not necessarily the same as getting up in the easiest way possible without toasting your legs. I'm a fairly strong cyclist and live in a pretty hilly area. I could surely get up anything with a 39/25, but even a short stretch at 8% grade in that gear would have serious consequences on the run. Since putting a compact on my tri bike a year ago I've noticed that in almost every race I do there's at least one climb where I'll spin up it in the 34/23 and get passed by 5-10 people in the bottom 2/3 of the climb, only to pass them in the final 1/3 of the climb and then put major distance into them on the downhill when they're recovering from the climb and I'm cruising. I think the major advantage of the compacts for Tri is in minimizing the delta between max power output and average power output, i.e., avoiding having to put out big surges of power that will hurt the run.