execute login items one after another instead of all at once? I have quite a lot of startup items, because when I open up my mac, I want everything to be ready to go. In my preferences, I've put them in the order I need them, so for example, the first thing I do, is browse to arstechnica and stackoverflow, so chrome starts first. next up are iTunes and spotify. iTunes to make sure that all my podcasts are downloaded, and spotify for my music, and then, my text editor of choice, and some other stuff.

The problem is, that all of these take quite some time and processing power to start up. They all get started up at about the same time,  so that when I start typing in the chrome omnibar, it's  slow and laggy, because of all the other stuff starting up in the background.

Is there a way to make them start up one after another? Or is this impossible? I really don't know wether apps send some kind of event to the OS to tell that they are completely ready.
You could make an automator action that starts each item serially, with staggered delays, or sleeps to ensure a delay between each start, and then simply place that single script as your startup item :)