One of my first tasks when I start at a new job is making a series of cd alias in my profile. These are usually to the git repositories where I'm going to be doing the most work, but its not an ideal situation because obviously sometimes I work with repos only once in a while. This is to avoid endless cd ../../../ or starting from my home directory every time.
I recently found out about zoxide and after a week of using it I'm not really sure why I would ever go back to shortcuts. It basically learns the paths you use, allowing you to say z directory_name or z term_a term_b. Combined with fzf you can really zoom around your entire machine with no manually defined shortcuts. Huge fan.