Dealing with increasing complexity in mid-/lategame

Hi! I've decided yesterday to launch another game of VP after a hiatus of about one and a half year, and I still need some time getting familiar with the lots of things that changed during that time. Meanwhile, I have reflected and believe to have found an area where I can improve my game drastically. Here's the thing:

While I feel like I have a decent early game (certainly not on point, but I usually manage to achieve my short to mid-term goals in ancient/classical era and get ahead/stay competitive), I often encounter myself having phases of basically "random" clicking in the midgame - basically cycling through the decisions the game offers me and take the next best choice (e.g. sending workers to the nearest empty tile, click on a reasonable building in the construction queue without evaluating the benefits). While I don't believe my intuition on these decisions is terrible, this leads to "blunders" like sending a worker in the opposite direction of the luxury i need to improve, or noticing 50 turns to late that I should have built a stable in a specific city.

Rather than advice for specific positions, I'd like to ask how you all handle the increasing complexity when the game goes on - how much do you micromanage, how do you automatize (e.g. citizen placement), whether you use any external helps like notes to remind you of specific strategic goals (for example, build building X in city C as soon as you unlock it) and in general what you do to maintain a high level of gameplay with a reasonable effort (this means: I won't play PBEM-style meticulously planning each turn, but am interested in "leveling up" my play). I currently play on difficulty 6 (while about two years ago, I was mainly on 7) if that matters.