I Stopped Writing Code First, And My Productivity Doubled

For most of my career, I followed the same instinct as every developer. Open the editor. Start writing code. Figure things out along the way. It felt productive. But over time, I realised something uncomfortable: Most of my time wasn’t spent building. It was spent correcting what I shouldn’t have built in the first place. So I changed one thing. I stopped writing code first. And my productivity didn’t just improve, it doubled. The Hidden Cost of “Start Coding” Starting with code creates an illusion of progress. You see lines being written. You see features taking shape. You feel momentum. But underneath, there’s friction: unclear requirements weak assumptions missing constraints untested workflows hidden edge cases The result? Rewrites. Refactors. Fixes. Delays. The real bottleneck was never typing speed. It was clarity. The Shift: Think First, Code Second I replaced one habit with another. Before writing a single line of code, I now define: what problem I’m solving what success looks