Rehydrating dry yeast can cut lag time. and it isn't hard to do. This wakes the yeast up & gives it strong cell walls foe being pitched into heavy wort to do it's thing.
Boil 1.5C of water in a small saucepan for a couple minutes. Cover & cool down to 90F. Pour into glass measuring cup to make it easy to pour later. Pour dry yeast packet in & stir lightly to mix with sanitized implement of your choice. cover with plastic wrap & let it work for 30 minutes. Go get fermenter santized,wort & top off in FV,whatever while you wait for the yeast to hydrate. When ready to pitch,make sure the resulting yeast cream is within 10 degrees of current wort temp. Maybe ad some of the wort a little bit at a time,mix,& check with thermometer & repeat till it's within 10 degrees of wort temp. But this must be done gradually,a little bit at a time to acclimate the yeast to the wort temp. This way,the yeast dosen't shock when added to the much cooler wort.
As a point of interest,If I hadn't over chilled the darn wort on my dark pseudo-lager,the WL029 yeast would've started fermenting about as fast straight out of the vial as the lighter colored one did with a starter. It did say on the White Labs vial that pitching the vial is good for up to 1.070 wort. I think if the vial is fairly fresh,that this is basically true. I got 2 vials of the WL029 with a previous order from midwest. Since they have high turnover,I have to assume from it's performance that it was pretty fresh.