The full term is "mise en place" and your analogy with the IDE is not far off, but there's an interesting nuance that's very useful to adopt when programming too. Mise en place is an ephemeral thing, you do it every time you start cooking and you look ahead at all the things you will need and arrange them in an optimal way for the steps you will take. It's an activity that encourages you to:

- always start from a clean state

- chunk your time

- give a bit of forethought to the work ahead

- do a little bit of workflow optimization

Over time, this is one habit that can have impressive compounding benefits.