Understand the existing flow (if its existing).. This is a crucial part as this will technically be the glue between your mental map and existing structure that you have, well in all honestly, might be a glue but it might be an "eraser", as on some cases it will cause you to identify some things that you might need to change, remove, or add even.
Creating a mental map of what needs to be done and how everything might be connected. This allows me to have a better understanding of what really needs to be done, and at the end even understanding the flow much better, which leads me to asking the right things, or catching potential issues.
Asking questions that you have while processing the "mental map", this includes potential issues that you think might cause you trouble or need to be fixed, then keeping track of these.
If it is a hard flow, I'd use something like excalidraw.io in which I can convert that mental map to a visual one, creating it with but not over complicating the visuals. I'd then have the questions/issues I've identified side by side as points, probably ranking them as well in some way, and colorizing the ones that are done/not done as well.
Taking some time to re-evaluate once more if you could potentially go another (smarter) way about it. I've heard somewhere of the 5 minutes rule, its something along the lines of giving something 5 mins to first settle in, and not just jumping right at it.
Not over optimizing them from the start, as I yet do not know what might arise and what might not really remain at the end, this doesnt mean that I should write shitty code. This has saved me a lot of time, but equally cost me time as well haha.
Trying to see what is already there, what I mean by this is, I've seen myself and other devs re-inventing a "custom wheel" a lot of times, but in this case, we had 3-4 instances of the same custom wheel around our codebase, now keeping this in mind, finding out that you might not need to do it from scratch does save some time.
Keeping myself honest, now this one is interesting, sometimes we tend to get "biased" when it comes to our own reasoning (shocker, right ?)... So every now and then, I do a reality check-ish with myself in terms of, "well, does this really make sense?", this tends to keep me grounded and has helped me to sometimes find out that there's really a better way of doing something.
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