From doing laundry to writing games documentation, a common thing I do is think of metaphors of something. I found myself making a template I plan to use for future things I design when started thinking about how so many different aspects of Games is just like cooking. At face value, this metaphor is able to say well when you're cooking you are following a recipe so, in most cases when you make a game you are following a recipe too. Now it goes without saying that these recipes are very different in that making a game is like making a 5-course meal for people, there are a bunch of tasks you need to do for each meal, the point here is that this metaphor is making a game is like cooking a 5-course meal for people and no one sharpened the tools.
The cooking metaphor can still take a completely different intent though, let's say you have two cooks and both cooks make one meal that is a Roast Beef Garnish with Mashed Potatoes and another meal that is a Caramel Desert foodstuff thing. Once all is said and done the first chef has a really good beef meal and an okay caramel one, but when they were cooking the caramel they made a huge mess. Meanwhile, the other chef burnt the beef and can't find the potatoes, now this is a bit of an exaggeration and a really long meTaPhoR but some devs might try to make one type of game and mess it up, but when they make another one they really blow it out of the park and make something super cool, before continuing on I'll say in both situations the chefs that made mistakes and the dev that messed up, the problem could have been avoided by being better-prepared blah blah and going forward they might prepare better and retry the recipe and do it right blah blah. For the case of the metaphor however they made an oops.
I could go on with metaphors as there is a lot running around in my head, like one that brings a focus to the kingpin time, but the reason I'm just vomiting this out into a blog is that thinking of metaphors of aspects in design really helped me understand it in a normal context, the cooking one definitely wasn't useful in every context sometimes it would be compared to packs of animals and stuff in the sense of how group work is meant to work. In short, It helps me understand buildings by looking at trees.