I don’t know what principles this kind of thinking falls under, but one useful approach is to know clearly what you’re trying to do, achieve, or understand. Know your assumptions and be honest about them, acknowledge that they can fail and challenge them when they carry critical weight in your reasoning, and keep peeling back those assumptions until you reach a point where their correctness rests on obviously reasonable facts or axioms that you no longer need to unpack.

Also, in my limited personal experience so far, the people who relentlessly talk about and evangelize first principles thinking (mostly highly self-confident tech bros and big-tech veterans) are often the ones who fail most absurdly at actually doing it. It reminds me of the exchange attributed to Robert Surcouf: when an English officer supposedly told him, “You French fight for money, while we English fight for honour,” Surcouf replied, “Each man fights for what he lacks.”

P.S I don’t have any stance on the French-English conflict in the anecdote above.