I learned a really useful Org mode command from Artur Malabarba’s first anniversary post: org-goto. The idea is that you want to navigate to somewhere else in the current Org buffer. You could fold the buffer and navigate to the proper subtree but often you want to leave the current subtree unfolded as well as the subtree you’re navigating to. The org-goto command, bound to 【Ctrl+c Ctrl+j】 by default, allows you to do just that. An copy of the buffer is created with an overlay displaying the buffer in overview mode. You can navigate within that buffer and press 【Return】 on the desired subtree which will take you back to the original buffer with the point at the new subtree.
That may not seem too useful but see Malabarba’s post for a compelling use case. In my case, it’s useful because of the large Org files I use to store my data. When I load such a file via a bookmark or it gets reloaded during a sync from git, it will be completely folded. The files are too large to set them to be completely unfolded so I have to have some way of finding the proper place. I used to call org-sparse-tree and then do a regular expression search for the proper heading. With org-goto, I can simply display the headers, navigate to the desired one, and press 【Return】 to navigate to the proper heading that will be conveniently unfolded. Very handy.
It’s a bit hard to explain how org-goto works so you should experiment with it a bit to see how you can fold it into your workflow. If you use Org files to organize your data as I do, this command is very likely to be a win for you.
UPDATE: There’s a really good discussion of org-goto and related navigation methods in the comments. Be sure to take a look.