A plan that cannot decide between two restaurants will name three, and the traveller will eat at none of them. The pattern is so reliable that we have come to use it as a diagnostic. When a draft, on the third reading, still has the word or in it, the writer has not decided. When the morning has Weekenders Coffee, % Arabica, and Kurasu inside the same kilometre, the writer has decided too much.
The two faults are the same fault. They are the writer hedging. A plan ought not to hedge.
The gap between the second meal and the next anchor is the part of a plan a traveller is most likely to abandon. It is small, unmemorable, unenforced. Nothing on the calendar is at stake. The traveller has eaten; the next thing is hours away; the writer has the empty afternoon to fill, and fills it with the safest, most repeatable kind of stop, which is coffee.
We notice that the writer's instinct, in this gap, is to suggest a second coffee in case the traveller did not like the first. This is the impulse the desk has come to call insurance. It is what produces the third coffee shop. Insurance, in a composition, is the writer's anxiety being passed to the traveller.
Our standing rule is now: where two coffee stops occur in the same half-day, the second is removed unless it sits more than 1.4 kilometres from the first. The number is not magical. It is the radius beyond which the second stop is on a different errand — a different street, a different neighbourhood, a different need. Below that radius, the second stop is the writer being unsure, and the desk's job is to be sure.
The same rule, written more generally: where a half-day has more than five named places, one is removed; where a sentence in a vendor card uses or, the writer has not decided. The traveller is not coming to the document for a list of possibilities. They are coming for the one place we would go.
A gap is not a failure. A gap is the part of the trip that becomes the trip — the bench in the temple courtyard, the lane the writer did not list because it had no name. The traveller will find their own coffee. The traveller does not need our second one.