I have traveled some for work over my career, but I never paid any attention to any of these programs or miles or anything like that. I probably missed out on a free flight at some point, but the thought of keeping track of those things seems tedious and dreadful. The whole culture of travel is like that really, parsing the tiny differences between anonymous airports and roughly-identical airlines. People become obsessed with checking in online exactly 24 hours in advance, etc. Expending effort for the tiniest, tiniest morsels of difference and succor in an overall terrible experience. It's understandable of course, but I just accept that it's all bad and try to forget about it as soon as it's over.
You really don't have to spend hours min-maxing your miles like described in the article. Just spend two minutes creating an account online, and ten seconds inputting your member number when buying tickets or checking in. Then two years later check your balance and you might have a free ticket worth $500+. That's a huge return given the amount of time invested.
It's like credit cards. There are entire websites dedicated to min-maxing the hell out of credit card points, sign-up bonuses, etc. But you don't have to do that. You can just spend an hour getting a good credit card (assuming you can :/) and then reap massive benefits compared to the amount of time invested.
I didn't do anything but sign up for club access on a website, link my number to my credit card, and tell them at work my number. Everything else is done automatically. I have 4 free return flights saved up now, ready to go.
