Timothy Pratley lists Seven specialty Emacs settings with big payoffs. These suggestions are “special” in that they aren’t basic settings that every new Emacs user gets around to implementing. Not everyone will want to use all of them. For example, he has a bit of Elisp that saves all the buffers when Emacs loses focus. Pratley explains his use case for this but it’s still not something I’d want.
Others, such as setting chords to run commands are very attractive to me and, in fact, is something I do. You may find some ideas that work for you so it’s definitely worthwhile reading his post.