Oftentimes, you don’t need to manually create a rig element for each Joint in the chain. There are ways to speed things up.

This page describes them.

Rigging Several Joints at Once

One such way is to create rig elements for all selected Joints.

1. Select a Joint:

2. Hold Shift and add one or several following Joints to the selection:

3. Click Add:

This will create sets of prototypes for every selected Joint.

One Element per Several Joints

Alternatively, you can create one rig element for several Joints. This approach has a benefit of making the rig simpler and easier to control.
What you need to do is:

1. Select the first Joint.

2. Select the last Joint.

3. Click Add:

How many Joints to ‘skip’ should depend on the configuration. For an arm, there is no reason to have more than three rig elements (for the arm, the forearm, and for the hand). So when there’s more (this might happen when the skeleton includes so-called twist bones for controlling rotations), you can create one rig element for two or more Joints.

Keep in mind, though: creating one rig element for several Joints would affect the rotation/bending in the resulting rig: a rig like this would only bend where rig elements are connected.
This doesn’t really matter for limbs, but could be limiting for parts like the spine, neck or tail.

For tails, you can use Spline IK to circumvent the problem.
For spine/necks, though, you’ll need to decide where you’d prefer them to bend, and rig them based on this decision.
A good way to check is to select Joints in the chain, rotate them and see which possible bending point better suits the kind of animation you plan to create ( don’t forget to undo the rotations!).