Why indexing sequence file with minimap2?
If you don't provide an index, minimap2 will just generate the index on the fly (so, yes, it's done without specifying it). As such the mapping step will take longer. However, index generation is supposed to be very fast in minimap2 (a few minutes for the human genome), so it probably won't matter much.

Doing it separately will therefore also not speed up your code unless you end up using the pre-generated index multiple times.