I've found that flowcharts are enormously helpful for software design and communicating the design decided upon. Maybe in your role you don't have a need to communicate how software should be written?

I like to make hierarchical text outlines.

I feel like once you need a general graph sort of structure, you're too far down the road to spaghetti and/or excessive detail.

I make flowcharts all the time. I find them particularly useful for showing stakeholders how different pieces of an integration project work together. Usually the moving parts are pretty coarsely grained, like an ETL job or something that writes out a file and something else that picks it up. IMHO, your 70s-era flow chart diagram is pretty good at that kind of stuff.

>However, I don't think people use flow charts on the job anymore

Only for our service desk. Much easier to read than walls of text.