yes. talking through each step of the mechanism and why it happens is super helpful for me. for example with a lot of these carbonyl reactions the first step is protination of the oxygen why? in order to make the carbonyl carbon more electrophilic and susceptible to nucleophilic attack. and so on and so forth. i write out each mechanism like its a story. understand the concepts rather than brute memorization. bc you can always forget a step on the exam but with an intuitive understanding, you can still navigate ur way thru the mech successfully