does anyone have any emacs productivity tips?

is there anything that you've done to your emacs to make it work really well?

im using gdb inside of emacs, i type M-x compile to make, i only use emacs -nw inside of terminal because the regular X version is too slow, stuff like that...

i've never used buffer rings, or customized keyboard shortcuts to automatically macro-out if statements and stuff....

im joining a startup soon, and want to get more efficiency out of my coding! :)