What's worked for me is reading Hadley Wickham's "Tidy Data" paper[0] and then applying the concepts with data.table. The speed is nice, but I really love what's possible with data.table syntax and how any packages work with it. That's opposed to what many people have decided "tidy" means, with non-standard evaluation and functions that take whole tables and symbols of column names instead of vectors.

[0]: https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html