For me it is not about time spent working, but your productivity rate; and for that reason I like to have an efficient workflow. One of those workflows is when I am editing a managing photos. I have what I think to be a very good way of managing and editing my photos in Aperture.

Organise

It is always good to organise your images, and the best way to do this is put them into a hierarchy, mine goes a bit like this.

In Aperture it looks a bit like this.

If your Library is organised it makes it much easier to find things and edit them.

Editing

After I have edited an image I rate it 1,2,3,4 or 5 stars; I would also add any meta data e.g. Keywords. Next I decide if it is Flickr worthy, if so it gets a Flickr tag added. This tag comes in handy when we get to my smart albums. These are contained in there own folder (Smart Folders). I have one for each lens followed by one for each camera body and finally one for any images tagged with Flickr. By tagging them I can see if I have already uploaded them or not, this makes life much easier.