Xah Lee has a nice post on obtaining Long Term Emacs Productivity. It’s 7 tips to help you be more productive with Emacs. Doubtless anyone who is not a complete n00b will disagree with some of his suggestions. I disagree with some of them. The thing is, we probably disagree on different things so the post is a useful thought provoker even if you ultimately dismiss some of its suggestions.
For example, Lee is very interested in ergonomics and has extensively investigated the (for him) optimal key bindings. I, on the other hand, generally avoid remapping keys to existing commands. That probably started when I was a n00b and, not understanding how Emacs eventually becomes an editor customized for each user, avoided remapping commands so that the experience would be the same no matter whose Emacs I was using. Several years on I no longer suffer under that delusion and—even though I still don’t remap existing command’s key sequences—I would find it painful if not impossible to use someone else’s Emacs productively.
Lee likes and recommends ido-mode while I vastly prefer the ivy, swiper, counsel package. Again, this is simply a matter of preference; there is no “correct” answer. I was an ido user before I switched to ivy and liked it a lot but for me the ivy package is probably my biggest productivity booster.
Those are my two quibbles with Lee’s tips. Yours will probably differ. Regardless, the post is worth reading for the ideas it presents. My only addition would be the idea of navigation by searching. That starts with Steve Yegge’s suggestion to use incremental search for navigation but also includes using the excellent avy library (the successor to ace-jump) for finer grained and quicker navigation.