Writing is thinking
A company asked why it was so hard to hire a good writer. I told them it was because good writing is an illusion: what people call good writing is actually good thinking, and of course good thinkers are rare.
Seems to follow that writing requires thinking. It further follows that writing is in fact just part of the process of thinking. You work it out as you go.
So too of just about everything else.
You need to write before you know what the piece says. You need to work before you figure out what the work is. You need to design before you know what it will look like. You need to code before you know what the feature will do.
This is such a simple, and painfully true concept. But yet I forget it every time I start something new. I start thinking about the whole of a design before moving a pixel. I start thinking about an entire set of routes and components without writing a single line of code. I start thinking holistically about some complex thing, without writing a single word about it.
So silly.
Work is required before you actually start the work.