Workflow

Does the perfect work flow exist?
We all have our methods, and I like to think each shot calls for a different approach. I was taught by some great teachers from pixar and ilm and they all had there own methods. A 2d guy Mike Venturini swore by making your poses and figuring your timing out in linear curves as it closest resembles a 2d timing chart. Andrew Gordon swore by the spline, and built everything up in layers. Martin L'Heureux, was all about the motivating force for what you were animating. He would completely finesse motor if you will of the motion that was occurring before moving onto anything, and building the pose from there, the man would literally slap you if you set one key without having your graph editor open. Reading online tutorials after school, I discovered most animators from the internet were all about the stepped mode, focusing solely on the pose, and from here building there animation, switching over to linear, working the timing and then heading over to spline.
After years of toying with these different approaches, I can finally confidently say I have found a flow that works best for me.
Remember when you were younger and would dump your bucket of toys onto the floor/bed, and battle Star Wars characters versus Transformers, with the occasional Ninja Turtle? Well whether you realized it or not you were actually animating. This is exactly how I do my first pass of blocking. Using only one control, no poses at all yet, just the key movements, and the timing. No stopping until every look and every up and down and every rotation is there on the root control. From here you can plan your anticipations, your squash and stretch, and you will have a good feeling of weight even, and your timing for your whole scene is now worked out. Upon successfully finishing this first pass most of the hard work is done and your shot will already start making sense, with no poses even sculpted yet!
The benefits I find to working like this 1) Floating, you lose that pose to pose feeling that is the curse of cg animation. 2) You are focused on the movement right from the get go, rather than the pose. 3) Once you start building your animation from the root up, a lot of great poses will build themselves for free. Once you have your movement figured out, you would be amazed at how easy it is to build a different pose merely by pulling some things around in the graph editor.
(As a side note this is typically how I cheat a lot of walks, animating a standard "vanilla walk" if you will, and pulling and scaling curves that have there timing and movement figured out already.)
A problem that will result from this root method, is that as you start working your way up the back all of a sudden the movement you wanted will be way to big! You wanted your character at 70 degree angle for the shot, you bent the root there, now you are bending your first back joint, and bam! you are at too great of an angle. Simply open up that root, and scale things down. Select all your animation for that rotation, click in the middle, turn your scale tool on and scale it down to what you need it to be. The root doesn't need to do all the work! From here I'll usually do the legs and build some nice lines of action right through from the feet to the head. Make my arms visible now, and try to find a way to use them as much as I need to without being distracting. I am finding if my movement is working nicely it's much less enticing to start over using the arms, like can be the tendency by working pose to pose early on.
There's my method, love to hear how you guys go about doing your animation as well.