thigns that really help me:
-contrinually try and pick out whats wrong with your work, be your own harshest critique.

-work just outside your skill range, dont try and animate an epic if you cant make a decent bouncing ball.

-allways look at other peoples techniques, why is the person next to you faster, better.

-dont get stuck in hours and hours to tweaking, find the root of the problem and simplifty the task, if somthing looks wrong with the hand dont piss about keying the hand all over the place, its probably somthign wrong with the hips or the shoulder. If the body is off balance everything else will be as well.

-Focus on the sillhouette, animate to a single locked camera and use this to judge the animation. Look at animatoin like burning safari, consider how different the impact of alot of animatoin would be if it was taken from another perspective.

-Look into and research your medium, cg is awesome for fast animation. The main adavantage is that we can have keyframes seperately and seperate out translates and rotates. Magic happens when you offset your keyframes and seperate out your translate and roatate keyframes.