Every place I have worked, we have spent a ton of time and energy trying to figure out how we keep track of the work we are doing in a way that 1) does not take more time than doing the actual work, and 2) does not make everyone crazy and miserable.
It’s a question that only gets harder to answer the more people you add to the mix.
I think it is pretty important that everyone involved have a pretty clear idea of what work we’re planning to do and why, and to pretty easily be able to figure out where any piece of that work sits at any given time. That means adding overhead, though, and the bigger the pool of work gets and more people participating, the more the overhead grows.
I feel like maybe a lot of teams and organizations trying to get the balance right could benefit from thinking about it in terms of information architecture, i.e., not just how the work is organized, but how our understanding of the pieces of work is structured.