It is extremely difficult to keep track of both the “big picture”, and the small details of things you are working on. For things like personal organization, you can use tools such as Trello to help you keep track of your big-picture projects and the tasks for each of those projects at the same time. In the software development world, we have things like system diagrams, logical architecture diagrams, and flow diagrams that attempt to show us various levels of detail for our projects.
Those diagrams can be useful at times, but I have never really liked any of them. Each diagram only gives you a certain level of detail; they do not allow you to zoom in or out to get access to the big picture and to the small details. There are some tools you can use to try and get something like this, such as what can be found at Coding the Architecture, but at least that technique/tool in particular requires you enhance your code to explicitly draw out that big picture. I don’t like that, as many times developers either do not know the big picture (hence part of the issue), or are too lazy or rushed to bother encoding that knowledge into the source code, and it would mean a tremendous amount of discipline to keep that up to date. I have never seen anything that lets you go from a “What does this system do?” level to a “What does this method do?” level.
Originally Posted on my Blogger site July of 2017