Really, the workflow shouldn't be that different between a serious amateur and a professional. If anything, professionals need to be the most efficient because of how many photos they take and how often they take them.

The first trick is to reduce the number of photos you have to look at. I take a quick pass through all my photos. I rapidly mark photos that are completely unacceptable for deletion and rate the remaining photos on a 1 to 5 scale based on the content (focus, composition, etc) rather than development settings (as long as they are within the range that can be fixed).

I mark average photos as 3, photos that have minor issues as 2s and photos that capture important things but have significant issues as 1s. On the other side, I label photos that came out better than average, but not quite outstanding as 4 and label the best of the best as 5.

After making my rating pass, I start triaging the images based on how much time I have available. I start with 5s and work down. First I make basic color corrections to however many images I feel like working on. This is generally a bulk process applied to multiple images at the same time to get white balance and exposure settings close, but not exact. This works well if you take multiple photos at the same place under similar lighting conditions.

In the next pass, which may not hit all the photos from my previous pass, I start and make detailed color and exposure corrections. I fix cropping issues in either this step or the previous depending on my mood.

Finally, I make a pass and do detailed touch up work on any photos from the 5s that I think particularly would benefit from it. I don't even always do this last step, but when I do it is usually very few of the images that get that level of treatment.