I work independently so I don't worry about what I look like working (and it is awful, usually messy hair and a pair of boxer shorts, who has time for a comb or pants?), but I definitely agree with the thinking on paper. Spending 15 minutes sketching out ideas with a pen saves me hours of dead-end code writing. That's especially true if I have to write a tricky algorithm of any type. I haven't seen one yet that couldn't be sorted out without a single line of code. I'm not talking about writing pseudocode either, I'm talking about drawing pictures of what an algorithm does (or needs to do). Boxes, squiggly lines and arrows are your friend. Or, to look at it another way, if you can't draw a picture of it, you don't know what you're doing yet. That mindset has made me much more productive (and saner).