Work the iron while it’s hot

Just like programming, writing requires a lot of context that you hold in your short term memory. You need to recall a lot of details about the topic you are writing about, as well as your punch-line and the current state of the document. All this state takes time to load into memory, and is easily lost by distractions or context switching.

Start at the Top not the Beginning

For documents that are more than a page long you must take a top-down approach and start with an outline. An outline is a list of sections together with rough notes, often in the form of bullet points.