I've noticed that the more time I spend with pen and paper before starting to type, the better the resulting program is. It's more natural to me, and maybe ever

I've noticed that the more time I spend with pen and paper before starting to type, the better the resulting program is. It's more natural to me, and maybe everyone, to just start typing feverishly with the end goal in mind, hoping to roughly get it working quickly before the ball of spaghetti gets too complicated. That's fun, but I've learnt not to do that. Unless it's a one-liner, every minute spent on paper first saves an hour or day later. Also I refactor as I go (which I learnt about decades later than I should have), striving to get the naturally emerging structure as clear as possible, in every way – data structures, single-purpose functions, variable names etc. That's apart from the general structure I plan initially, but planning things first makes the refactoring infinitely easier. So, for me it's kind of a combination of the two.