At my pizza store job we have to make our own dough each day. Once a batch is mixed it comes out as a single fairlylarge lump which needs to be cut into smaller lumps that are the correct weight for the style of pizza base you’re trying to make at the time, and each of these lumps is then rolled into a ball so that it will come out round when we put it through another machine which is essentially a glorified automated set of rolling pins. When you’re done cutting up and balling a batch of dough to make classic-crust bases you ideally end up with 52 dough-balls, so there are quite a lot of lumps to be cut and balled.
There are a couple of approaches to this task. You can either cut off and then roll each lump into a ball as you go, or you can cut the whole batch into lumps and then roll them all into balls. If you wanted to you could take the middle ground and cut off a few lumps before balling till the whole batch is done. As it turns out however, the most efficient way is to cut the whole batch into lumps first and then roll them into balls, because changing between the two tasks involves a slight delay each time that quickly adds up if you do it more than once.
If you’re carrying out a task with multiple steps — or even carrying out multiple discrete tasks — you can save some serious time over the long run by making sure each step or sub-task is complete before moving on to the next.