Comment by eyelidlessness

It’s a muscle you can exercise, and doing so helps you learn what to focus on so it’ll be successful. IME a very successful approach is to focus on interfaces, especially at critical boundaries (critical for your use case first, then critical for your existing design/architecture).

Doing this often settles the design direction in a stable way early on. More than that, it often reveals a lot of the harder questions you’ll need to answer: domain constraints and usage expectations.

Putting this kind of work upfront can save an enormous amount of time and energy by precluding implementation work on the wrong things, and ruling out problematic approaches for both the problem at hand as well as a project’s longer term goals.