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[Virlomi]

One thing I've noticed about my little dwarves is that they enjoy wasting time by mining a hallway down a few levels, then running to the opposite end of the fort to mine a room for a few blocks, then go back to the hallway to tunnel it out some more, then go back to the room.

It would be nice if they had a bit less ADHD and could focus on finishing what is nearest to them before running off.

[Astramancer]

Hear hear!

Knowing their behavior for determining which thing to mine first can help you designate in such a way that they (generally) mine efficiently.  Failing that, burrows.

I can't remember the exact order, but they generally try to mine from left to right, from the left side to the right side.  So if you're designating a huge room, they'll dig in a really crazy pattern, constantly running around from one side of the room to the next.  But if you designate a two-wide hallway where the edges of the room will be, they'll dig it out pretty fast and straight forward, then you designate the rest of the room, and they'll generally clear it out in a logical manner.  It's faster for you to just do the whole thing at once, but it's faster for them if you do it in smaller chunks.

and if you don't want to do burrows, then install a door at your mineshaft, and lock 'em in!  (just remember to release them before they starve...)

[Silverionmox]

It's a fact though that we can use some task grouping, e.g. cleaning up rubbish: there's no need to send fifteen dwarves to pick up fifteen pieces of goblin clothing; one that makes trips suffices for non-time-sensitive jobs. It's a prerequisite for giving that same single dwarf a basket and let him pick up the whole suit at once.
Another example is when you designate a corridor to be widened 60 levels underground: the game'll assign a square to be mined out for every miner you have, forcing them to run all the way down and back to mine their single square, while a single dwarf could have easily mined them all in a row.

[Fred Lobster]

One thought that I had recently regarding the Mining skill (that may have been D&D-inspired) was for dwarf miners to have some kind of 6th sense about stone. Maybe make it so that, once a Miner hits Legendary, he'll start noticing ore veins and gems that are located 2 tiles away even if there's a wall in the way? You could designate these tiles with a ?, which shouldn't look too garish against the standard black background... As they hit Legendary +3, maybe even increase it to 3 tiles away.

Alternatively, I think it'd be fantastic if Strange Mood miners would grab a pick and start digging straight toward the nearest motherlode of native gold or platinum. That'd be a WHOLE lot more fitting than having them randomly make a diorite cabinet studded with elk bone out of the blue...

[PeterisP]

It often happens that a dwarf finishes mining but the next mineable square is already "taken" by some other guy who is far away, but coming.   So he looks for another place to dig...

A solution might be if the game at that moment would check if there are any "taken" squares very close (say, range of 2-3), then try to verify if by swapping the orders the distance is improved. By swapping orders I mean that the "taken" square gets reassigned to the close-by dwarf that just became available, and the guy who was already assigned gets to look for a new target as usual.