Information expires, and specificity adds to its obsolescence
Storing too much information is a problem, and I'm not talking about cloud storage costs.
Imagine that you receive the following information: Lady Gaga is working on her next album.
If it's true now, would it be true tomorrow? Probably. Chances are she'll spend a couple months until she finishes the album, and the sentence will still be true during that period. However, if you receive a more specific information the scenario might change:
Lady Gaga is working on the first song of her new album
For how long will this sentence be true? Maybe a couple of days or weeks.
Lady Gaga is writing the lyrics for the first song of her new album
For how long will this sentence be true? Maybe a couple of days or hours.
Lady Gaga is writing the chorus of her new album's first song
For how long will this sentence be true? Maybe a couple of hours or even minutes.
When it comes to software, we could say the same. And Kent Beck recently reposted a nice article about that subject called “Software is Bananas” (link below).
Thing is, different information in different contexts will have different “expiration dates”. Let's say you have a problem, and you want to create a software product to solve that problem, so you formulate a hypothesis:
If this idea I have works, problem X will go away.
If you don't implement your idea in, let's say, 6 months, it might not make sense anymore even if the original problem still exists. It's only natural: the problem is less volatile than the solution, because the later depends on the former.
But let's say you decide to move forward and implement your idea. You then start to make notes on how to do it:
To implement this idea, I will do step X, step Y and step Z.
Same rule applies here. If you don't follow the steps you established right away, you might decide to implement the very same idea in another way. The steps are more specific and therefore more volatile.
In summary, it's ok to have a list of problems to solve as long as you don't spend too much time thinking on how to solve many of them at a time. And it's ok to discuss the implementation details of a handful of ideas, as long as you are really certain you're going to implement them in the next few days.