That's basically what I did the first year working with git. Then I met a coworker that told me to stop doing this and come with him on a whiteboard to underst

That's basically what I did the first year working with git. Then I met a coworker that told me to stop doing this and come with him on a whiteboard to understand and solve the problem. That was painful the first month, but after some months of that treatment I had a strong mental model of exactly what happened, and how to fix it. I think overall the mental model is to 1) get knowledgeable enough to be able to actually draw the current graph of commits, branches and inheritance 2) clearly lay down the desired structure of the target graph 3) perform the steps necessary to transform the graph from 1) to 2).