This hints at the antithesis to this article

Doing a thing involves doing it, but it's very unlikely that doing a thing will involve exactly one atomic movement. So you have cutpoints at doing the thing.

So to do the thing you first have to decide to do the thing. You have to decide what the thing is, or at least have enough of a vision of the thing to take the first step at doing a thing that might look like the thing.

So "doing the thing" involves a lot of doing things that aren't the thing, but without which you won't get towards the thing.

In other words: sitting down and writing down what the thing is _can very well_ be part of doing the thing.

There's a sort of philosophical point too, about whether the thing is what you think it is. Plenty of people have had the "I thought this feature was going to do X, you thought it was going to do Y, and we all realised the mismatch very late in the process".

I think both visions of the world are valid, and things you can keep in your mind at the same time to deploy as needed.