Process

I'm gonna go a little into the... process, of sorts, that I have sort of developed whilst animating. Note that this differs for a lot of shots depending on complexity and botheredness and the number of attempted shortcuts, but you'll get the gist.

1. Thumbnails. This includes anticipation and follow through poses. The times I didn't do them (really short shots, simple movements, that sod) I generally left out anticipation etc. and told myself it'd be quick enough that it would look alright. It generally didn't. (On that topic, do anticipation and follow through poses count as keyposes? I didn't know how to categorise them so I've been circling them as keyposes, but then every second number ends up circled so that the entire system feels redundant.) Oh yeah and line of action. It's a good reference sheet for that when you get caught up in the details on the real thing.
2. Roughing out keyposes. I do this in blue. Man, I totally take back what I said about the col-erase before; you get used to them and they are indispensable. I can do such clean drawings in HB now... anyway, this is so you can quickly see if the action works when you do the...
3. Pencil test. Usually I hate doing the whole, take photos of everything and check movement,wash, rinse, repeat- as essential as it is- and try to minimalise number of repeats, but I found that doing one at this stage saves a lot of bother down the track. Unless you do this part digitally, but I prefer not to, as then I can draw directly over my ruffs instead of copying them or whatever. I use this stage to work out my preliminary...
4. Timing. Or doping. I tried doing that first but I got it wrong more often that way, so this is my order of things. I also tried using dope sheets, but I guess my unwillingness to waste more paper and ink than I do already has me just drawing keycharts all over my thumbnailing sheet instead. They don't really go into such silly details in the books. Anyway, I still get my timing wrong lots doing this though; it's like when you animate in stepped and have to massively change the timing when you change to spline in 3D. The feel is just really different, it is so hard to tell. But since there is less freedom to adjust in 2D, I try to reuse similar timings that have worked in other shots. Otherwise, it's very arbitrary. Here is the rough pencil test of one of my better shots. 
5. Clean-up keyposes. They tell you to clean up at the end in the books, but that doesn't address the issue of how I do accurate in-betweens in that case, so either I read the books wrong or... well, this is my way.
6. Breakdowns/In-betweens. Depending on how secure or time threatened I feel, I would then go about filling everything in, with maybe some pencil tests interleaved. Mostly without, because I am time pressed. I would prefer to draw too many in-betweens and cut them out than draw too little and have to repeatedly boot up my laptop to test it. Anyway, eventually I get to some barely passable stage and that's a completed shot. This one here is mostly complete, except for the ending.

I reckon if I actually followed this foolproof master plan I could probably churn out some half decent animation. But, reality. And I find that I get a lot of shots that simply don't work; in that case the best thing to do is start over. But, rush job.

I am trying not to think about the inking.

^One of my crappier attempts, this one went through quite a few iterations. And I still hate it.