Being 100x more productive is about not solving hard problems you don't need to. Spending time thinking about ways to avoid the problem often pays off (feature definition, code reuse, slow implementations, ect). Much of the best practices that you read about are solving problems you wish you had - I wish my problem was poor documentation because that means someone actually cares to use it. I was always surprised by how bad the code was out in the wild until I realized it was survivor bias - the previous owner deferred solving some problem for a long time.