Whether to use Steps or Conditions within a single step in a SharePoint workflow

Question

I'm creating a workflow that does the following, and I'm looking for guidance on the best practices of splitting up a workflow into conditions and/or steps.

For the Projects list, each time a list item is created or modified, the workflow should run and do the following:

If Status = New, create a couple variables AND send specific email

If Status = Open, send specific email

If Status = Estimated, send specific email

If Status = Approved, send specific email

If Status = Ready, send specific email

If Assigned To is modified, send specific email to the Assigned To person or group.

If Status = Ready, and has been ready for more than 5 days, send specific email.

So for the first 5 items above, it seems to me they could all be separate conditions/actions within a single step. For the Assigned To item, I think I'll need to have the primary workflow create a record in a new list, which would then trigger a secondary workflow to send the notification email to the Assigned To designee. And for the Status over 5 days item, should this just be another condition/action under the primary workflow's step 1 or should it be a separate step?

In this scenario, I'm just not seeing any need for separate steps within the primary workflow. Am I missing something? What's the general thinking for when you should use additional steps in workflows, as opposed to just adding conditions?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think I finally stumbled on the answer to my own question.

From what I can tell, in any step, the workflow will stop once a condition branch evaluates to true. So if more than one action needs to occur before the workflow is started again, then each of those conditions must be in it's own step. You can have a single step with multiple conditions of course, but only one of those conditions can evaluate to true.

Does this sound accurate?