It was a hard habit to break, but now I just write a first draft, and go fix the names afterwards if I have to.
When I first started programming I wrote a lot of code without much planning, and it was good because it allowed me to learn a language faster by interacting with it. When what should have been pretty straightforward programs started to get unwieldy, I realized that I had to do something different. Now I go at it with pencil and paper before writing any code, and I find it much more productive and fun because the level of understanding is better.
It's so easy to write code and it seems like it's so easy to change, but with any non-trivial problem I think that this is really an illusion. There are many times when it is useful to write exploratory code without much planning, but I think it's mostly useful for learning a new environment or banging out a minor variation of something you've done before. Otherwise it seems more useful to do some fairly systematic planning, even if it's for a prototype that may get completely reworked over a number of iterations where requirements are explored and may change.
As a practice, it started for me when I first started working on writing some literate code. I would basically write a paragraph about what the function should do, then write up the function definition, then move on to the next program.
It has definitely made my code more coherent and feels like a necessity for anything more than a few hundred lines.
Lots of stuff I write I still just dive in and code because it's "obviously" simple. Sometimes that simple problem grows into a mess of 1k+ LoC, sometimes not.
If I'm trying to get the shape of the code down before I lose it, then I'm thinking about what it does and how it does it. When I'm naming variables etc I'm thinking about explaining what it does in a way that's clear to me now, me later, and whoever else has to understand / maintain my code.
This even goes back to tools as early as the hypertext tool Notecards. I remember they had a qualitative study where they found that people got really sidetracked trying to think of the name for a Notecard. I think the title of the paper with the study was "Reflections on NoteCards: seven issues for the next generation of hypermedia systems". I can't seem to find an electronic copy online.
Anyway, I have found a similar thing with the naming in my own programming. It is very hard to break habits with stuff like this. For example, for writing tasks, I finally had to switch to something like Notepad to write the first draft so I wouldn't be tempted to muck with formatting, spell check, grammar check, etc.