[RetroTechie]

"Waiting periods are one of the biggest causes of unoptimized processes in real life. You need to identify waiting periods and try to reduce or eliminate them."

That's just 1 way of dealing with wait time. And not even a good one: some wait times can only be reduced at ever-increasing effort (diminishing returns).

Another way is to make the wait time useful so it's not 'lost'. It's kinda like a scheduler in multi-tasking OS: some process 'blocks' (wait time starts), in response you just switch to a different activity. No busy waiting, no 'cpu time' lost.

[xyzzy123]

The "wait time" in practicals is a good opening for lab partners get to know each other. There shouldn't be too much but 5 or 10 minutes here or there is good.

Sometimes natural slack is better for this than explicitly provided socialisation cues.

When you optimise ideally you should ensure you are thinking about the whole system.

It sounds like the changes here were positive but it's good to be mindful that everyone has blind spots and systems involving humans often have unstated objectives or things going on that aren't part of the "spec".