Keepin' It Tidy

Cleanliness is next to godliness, or in this case, a well organized scene makes for an efficient animator.

Scenes in Maya can quickly become a mess in a few different ways. The time you spend searching for something, even if it's just a few seconds, is time that could have been spent making your animation great. I hold this mantra for most things, and I find that if I'm repeating the same action again and again then I should probably write a script that does it automatically. Save time wherever you can so you can focus on what's important.

Bloated scenes can actually slow down your fps, so the first thing I'd recommend is going up to File and clicking on Optimize Scene Size. I usually go through and activate everything except display layers (it has deleted layers I wanted to keep). It'll get rid of anything superfluous floating around your scene.

Your outliner can quickly become cluttered with all manner of things and you have to peruse a list to find what you're looking for. I know some people use groups to organise things, which is viable but make sure to check if it will screw up things in your pipeline. What I'd recommend is using outliner colours, and have a system behind it, blue for characters, yellow for lights, etc. You can find this in your attribute editor under Display.

I used to find the amount of red ticks in the timeline a bit daunting, they didn't tell me anything about my timing except when I was blocking out my key poses. And if you bake something out on every frame, it quickly becomes a red bar, telling you nothing.

I use the special tick draw to colour my key poses yellow, my golden keys, so that I can quickly have context in my timeline. I'll even set these kind of keys if I'm using mocap, just so I can kind of see how these poses relate to one another timing-wise.

You can quickly set these kind of keys using this line of MEL, I recommend setting it as a hotkey:
$now=`currentTime -q`; setKeyframe `ls -sl`; keyframe -time `currentTime -q` -tds 1 `ls -sl`;

Lastly, I've also been enjoying using a tool called "Maya Timeline Marker," by Robert Joosten, that allows you to select frames in the timeline and assign a background colour to them. I used this a lot on The Jungle Book and Last Jedi to colour words in a dialogue or where breaths were in the reference. It's an additional way to make your timeline really mean something other than how long is it and where am I in it.

All of these things shave off a bit of time. They clear away technical hinderances and allow you focus on doing what you want to do: animate.

Keep on keyframing!