SEQUENCE / BATCH

Put dependent steps in order and group similar work to stop constant switching.

Every evening of your vacation-planning month looks the same: 10 minutes browsing hotels, an interruption, a detour into flight prices, a half-finished packing list, then back to hotels, which have changed price. Nothing depends on anything, everything is open at once, and the constant switching means each session starts by reconstructing where you were.

Sequence and batch are two halves of one move. Sequencing puts dependent steps in the order the dependencies require; batching groups similar work into one block so you stop paying the switching cost. The cue is either doing step four before step two, or shredding attention across many small, similar tasks. The operation: list the steps, mark which ones truly depend on others, do those in order, such as booking the fixed constraints of flights and lodging first, then group the independent lookalike tasks, like all restaurant research, into one sitting. When it works, decisions stop getting reopened, and the same tasks take visibly less time. The spec's boundary is sharp: never batch what needs immediate action, since fraud alerts reviewed monthly give an attacker weeks, and do not sequence what should stay loose, as when scheduling every museum room kills the wandering that was the point.