How to find the right balance between details and the main ideas? I am a young PhD-student who just started doing real research in mathematics. Of course, this starts with learning stuff which has already been investigated. If I try to understand for instance a paper someone wrote, I find it difficult to focus on the main aspects and ideas of the paper. Most of the time, I get stuck on some elementary details, which I had not thought about until I read them in that paper. Convincing myself that this detail is true is a matter of a few minutes, but the time adds up, so I end up losing quite a lot of time trying to understand details not directly related to the problem, but occurring in the solution of the problem. But if I skip this detail, I have the feeling that I did not really understand what the author is doing in the paper. On the other side, if I think about every detail, I lose my focus on the main aspects of the topic, which is not great either.

Conversely, if I work on my own problems, I tend to get stuck on minor details as well. Unfortunately, my advisor is not a good help in this regard.

My question is therefore the following, which can be also asked in other areas of research, not only in mathematics:

How does one find the right balance between focussing on the main aspects of a topic and the details, both in actual research and in trying to understand works of other people?
In mathematics, being able to read papers is a skill on its own, and learning how to do it properly is part of “mathematical maturity."  Most everyone runs into this sort of problem at first, and with practice, you get better at seeing the forest through the trees.

One concrete strategy is to skip the small steps and to assume the details in them are true.  You can verify those details after you understand the main ideas.  Of course, you still need the skill of telling apart the small details from the important ideas.  Same goes for research -- you can make a big plan of attack and assume the details will work out later, and then if the big plan succeeds, you can go back and do the detailed calculations carefully.  Here, what is needed is intuition about what "should be true if worked out."  But such intuitions take time and practice to develop.