The first thing I do is list everything I need for a workstation in an orgmode text file. For why orgmode really works well for this -http://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html

Every couple of years I find myself facing the same old tired routine: migrating my stuff off some laptop or desktop to a new one, usually combined with an OS upgrade. Is there anything like the kind of luxuries we now consider normal on the server side (IaaS; Terraform; maybe Ansible) that can be used to manage your PC and that would make re-imaging it as easy as it is on the server side?

There's a decent cheat sheet (https://orgmode.org/orgcard.pdf) that I refer to a lot.

I only use Emacs for org-mode stuff so far. For pretty much anything else I'm using VS Code.

Then I decided I was going to just do a few small bits to begin , following Rainer Koning's videos on youtube.