That's one of the most understated advice. Quite often managers like to see lots of code, or developers have screwed up incentives and get payed by the lines of code. If a manager walks by, their heart gladdens when they see you banging on the keboard like mad -- to them that equals to "work being done". They fail to realize that sometimes that equals to "more un-necessary garbage added to the existing pile of code" that will eventually make the product unstable, brittle and hard to maintain.
Sitting there with a notepad and a pencil thinking about the problem is when I find I actually solve the difficult problems not when I type furiously at a keyboard.
One day myself and another guy were debugging a piece of code by staring at it, figuring the logic out in our heads and pitching theories back and forward. The boss walked past, saw we were sitting there "doing nothing" and told us to do some work... ugh!
I have no idea how this works, but it does: when sharing a screen with someone and doing work: if one of you is pointing at something code-looking, the boss reverts to thinking you are working. This works even if you are discussing non-work things... its not content they care about but form :/
Sitting there with a notepad and a pencil thinking about the problem is when I find I actually solve the difficult problems not when I type furiously at a keyboard.