It's more of like doing system designing (pre-planning), the system design stage is way of looking at the bigger picture by connecting the dots, and yh, it could be a mind thing but I mostly use my pen and paper or if it's something that's really difficult to nail, I use the C4 modeling (you can use whiteboard, paper or any C4 modeling tool).

C4 modeling would give you the abstract design or system architecture graph, you don't have to do all 4 levels diagram, just do the one that makes sense to you.

If you are doing something simple, you might not need to do any of that but as soon as you are building something of scale with optimal security not doing system designing is like building a skyscraper with no design, well, you know what might go wrong :)