When to run the Chain It Helper in parallel or serial?

Here's a question we've received a few times:

When formatting 3 fields at once (first name, last name, email) and Chaining together as one HTTP post, is it okay to click No, run instantly? 

Yes, absolutely. When the order doesn't matter, like in this case, then just letting the Chain It Helper run all three other Helpers with no delay is just fine.

What we're really talking about here is running them in parallel or running them in serial. When you let them run all at once, you're running them in parallel. When you run them with a short delay in between each Helper, then you're running them serially – one after the other.

The only time it's necessary to run them with the delay – or serially – is one one Helper uses the value of the previous Helper. So let's say that in the first Helper you set a custom date field to today's date using the Set It Helper. Then in the second Helper you're adding 1 week to that value using the DateCal Helper. In this case, since the second helper depends upon the value from the first Helper, you'd want to choose run them with the slight delay option (or serially).