It think it mainly depends on the difficulty of the problem. If you're working on a very difficult math problem - say, a novel proof - you're definitely going

It think it mainly depends on the difficulty of the problem. If you're working on a very difficult math problem - say, a novel proof - you're definitely going to lay out the tools and techniques, the various steps of the proof, before you sit down and start writing it out. But for homework problem #7 of 14, just start doing it - you'll figure it out. Similarly, if you're writing a CRUD app in a stack you've used before, you can probably just start. But if you're writing something complicated that you haven't done before, you should probably visit the whiteboard before the IDE.