Planning is for doing
I work in crisis management, sometimes on tense, hours-long outage calls. Very often, engineers or others on the call will say things like "It would be nice to run test $x before we move forward."<p>It basically always pays to ask a counter-question like "Will we want to change our action in some way based on the result of this test?"<p>Often the answer is no, so we can skip doing the test and get to remediation faster.<p>Once you notice this pattern (it's clearer in outage situations where moments matter), you frequently catch people (including yourself, if you're honest) seeking information that they don't even /plan/ to use as an input to some decision or action. In other words, there is no conceivable future where the answer to some proposed question would have an effect on their actions. If you find such a situation, you can at minimum remove answering that question from the critical path, and possibly just never bother finding the answer at all.<p>That doesn't mean that having such information is bad, just that we should think of the cost of gathering suit against its likelihood of mattering in terms of our actions. In fact, possibly one of the central purposes of IT broadly is to lower the cost of answering such questions, so that we can afford to ask more of them.