Not really a trick of Vim itself, but when using Vim from the terminal I find ctrl-z very useful to background Vim, type in a few shell commands for git or whatever and then use "fg" to hop back into Vim.
Ctrl-Z only gets converted to SIGTSTP if the terminal has ISIG set. For example, try `stty -isig; sleep 5` and try to suspend or interrupt the sleep command.