What's your plan?

A question I ask before starting a task, whether I'm working solo or as part of a team is "What is your plan?".

How am I going to approach the task I'm about to start working on?

What information do I need?

What approach am I going to take and which am I not going to take?

What will some of the puzzle pieces be? Will I need a route, a Controller, a Service, a Command, a Value Object?

Asking these questions and making these initial decisions upfront greatly reduces my implementation time as I only need to focus on delivering what I've already planned.

And I can capture these decisions in a README file or diagram, that's ideal.