work on anatomy/ plan out your poses before drawing

You can also try shading and adding some highlights if you'd like.

How often do you use references? (Pose references, animal references, etc)

Not very often, why? :o

References can help greatly. It helps with the basic structure and understanding of something
like fur textures, or directional poses, and how some anatomy works. References can come from
anything from pictures to other art. It truly depends on what your going for, though.

(Trying my hand at examples)
Let's say I want to draw a cat, but I want to draw a cartoon cat, but I don't know much about cats.
I would Look up a picture of a cat or Take a picture of a cat for a basic Cat reference for feline anatomy.
Then, I would Look up Many different
Cartoonized Cats To see
The basic features of cats that people use in their artwork. From their I try My own way of a cartoonized cat
by using all of the things that I have learned about real cats and cartoon cats.
(sorry if this example wasn't very good.)

The basic setup of a pose is also very important. Those are usually drawn as Gesture Drawings.
Gesture Drawings are basically simple scribbles of how you'd want the character or object to look.
http://www.furaffinity.net/full/13466485/
The first and second scribbles are gesture drawings. they set up the basic form an pose of the character.

I use Gesture drawings as well. They don't look exactly like Myenia's Gestures, but they do the same job.
No one's scribbles look the same as someone else's scribbles. I've looked. It's actually pretty neat.
So, don't get worried if you don't draw gestures in the same way. Everyone has their own way of learning, and their own style.