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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/8135
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It's tempting to include all this information that you _already know_, so what's the harm? The harm, as you indicate in your question, is that the outline no longer serves as a good gauge of your progress through the work.

What is the purpose of the outline? If your publisher requires it then follow your publisher's guidelines -- but, probably, the outline is for _you_. You should therefore include the amount of detail that _meets your needs_. Since you want a consistent level of detail, this means either adding a lot more detail for the parts you haven't written yet or cutting detail out of the outline for the parts you have written. (It's already in your book/story, so it's not lost.) The latter sounds easier to me.

Perhaps you are tempted to include the detail because you need to keep track of key events, character moments, and so on. That's important too, but consider using a different tool for that -- a timeline, a map, a collection of notes sorted by topic/character/place/artifact, or whatever.

My field is technical writing, not fiction, so I don't need to keep track of characters and plot elements -- but I do need to keep track of code snippets that I've used as examples, interactions among different parts of the system, and the introduction of key concepts. I use notes, lists on whiteboards, and sometimes a task-tracking system to keep track of all this. The outline, on the other hand, remains a glorified table of contents, helping me to keep track of the book organization as a whole without getting bogged down in details.

Original score: 3