I weight every charge, every time. I tried to justify using a powder thrower by saying, ok, I'll use that for plinking ammo, but, I like to hit what I'm aiming at, even when plinking, so my plinking ammo needs to be as accurate as my serious ammo, I suppose. I mean what's the fun of missing? lol
I do usually use factory ammo to get the rifle on paper, than then start with my handloads. I never worked up a 30-06 load, but if I did, using your 180 gr for example, with say IMR 4350, my Sierra book (old 2nd edition) lists minimum at 48.7 and max at 56.0. I never start at minimum. Maybe I'm impatient or just don't want my bullets going that slow, but I usually start at some middlepoint, in this case it would be 52.3 which the book says will yield 2600fps. Now I'll load 20 rounds, 5 at the start point, 5 at the max, and 5 each of equal steps between my start load and max load. In this case that would be maybe 53.5 and then 54.8.
By firing all four sets in order, if I see improvement all the way through, and the best is the max, I'd probably just stop there if it was adequate, and if the cases show no pressure problems. If the best was the third batch of five and it dropped off with the max, I would work up 5 loads of the third batch, and five each of three incriments between the third and the max, and do it again.
Normally I'm going to the range with 2 or 3 rifles and doing any more than 5 of each incriment and more than 4 incriments would be prohibitive, timewise.
Now, why don't you have a chronograph? Could it be the same reason I didn't have one til last week? I thought they were a huge $ investment, and never bothered to look into them. Last week, I found a Chrony Chronograph for about $75 to the door from EA Brown.
I haven't tried it yet, but it seems like a nice machine.