I tend to lay out a new program in simple 4-5 word comments describing the general flow and major function calls. This, I have found, gets me going in the right direction.

Of course I have to move some of them around as the solution becomes more clear to me.

But generally speaking, I think tilly... your way of doing things is very similar to mine or should I say "my way is similar to yours" - as far as program design. I still have far to go but my average function is below 20 lines now.

Prost,
Moe