What sort of techniques do you employ in your planning (prewriting) stage?

My Writing Process
As you saw from the assigned readings and materials, writing is considered to be a process. The process begins the moment you get an assignment and ends after the assignment is submitted (or, in some cases, even after that). The three main stages to the process are the planning (or prewriting) stage, the drafting stage, and the revision stage. The assigned reading and materials look at different aspects of the process, and how students approach writing. For this assignment, answer all of the following questions:
What sort of techniques do you employ in your planning (prewriting) stage?  What do you do when you are first given a writing assignment? What is your “plan of attack”?
What sort of environment do you normally like to write in? Is it quiet? Noisy? Do you listen to music? What do you use (pencil, paper, notebook, laptop, desktop, etc.)? Do you need any sort of refreshments? What about lighting? Time of day? What are your optimal writing conditions? How often do you get to write in optimal conditions?
When you draft, where do you start? Thesis statement? Do you use an outline? How does your draft progress?
What do you think about revision? What is your reaction to feedback? Who do you normally get to look over your papers before you turn them in? How does revision help you?
From the assigned readings and lecture materials, do you think you may try to use strategies presented that you normally have not used in the past? If so, what looked useful to you?  Please be specific and detailed in your response.
This should be in paragraphs (not a bulleted list).  Use the default settings when creating discussion board posts (meaning do not use MLA format).   This should be submitted by typing into the message box (do not submit as a file attachment).