When I got my first corporate job, I was placed in a group of 20 trainees in a rigorous COBOL course. We were given assignments and a schedule to complete them.

Most of us read the specs, then raced into the coding phase, hands to IBM mechanical keyboards. One guy took a different approach. He took a legal pad and pencil, and wrote his whole program on paper before he ever approached a terminal. He’d do his own bug checking and syntax checking, instead of having the compiler do it ( compiles took longer in those days, and required JCL ). He avoided the entire compile/wait/read-with-dismay/quickly-try-again loop.

He was one of the top students, of course. And a lot less stressed, as I recall.