It’s interesting that this two year old article popped up in my daily Medium digest. Certainly valid points to be had there but the biggest take away for me is to contrast how I think about and organize my time vs. how lots of other people (i.e. the intended audience here on Medium) must organize their time and tasks. The immediate thing that comes to mind is that “goal” is a synonym for “project” and that, yes, the calendar is not a good project planning tool or time management except to show you what will interrupt your work at certain times each day — and these are only the scheduled things! So traditional project management thinking, especially planning and scheduling, addresses this whole idea of actually figuring out what you need to do before you actually need to do it — you can look at GTD as a light version of this or full on project task planning and scheduling as the other end of the continuum. I also understand that business is war and, like battle plans, project plans need an awful lot of replanning because you can’t perfectly know or control the world and replanning takes time and effort to do right. Nonetheless — and sure, my career has made me gravitate to the idea of breaking down projects into tasks and at least attempting to schedule them — if all I did was to stick my to do list into my calendar without thinking about what’s coming up and what I need to do to prepare for upcoming work, then no tool is going to keep me from drowning in a sea of obligations. But maybe people in this up and coming generation of workers who grew up in a more hypertext/wiki-fied/Basecamp kind of culture do different types of work than I do, are used to different tools, and just think differently about work. Whereas I remember summer jobs and early parts of my career spent toiling in MS-DOS, WordPerfect and Lotus 1–2–3… and I tend to not be very stylish or creative in my output at times and I tend to try to think in a structured format and I’m less comfortable in less structured (even restricted?) tools. So, my overall response to this well-written article is “Duh, goal = project” but I’m also aware that I don’t do a lot of what people would commonly refer to as creative work these days and that my preferred toolset might seem antiquated or irrelevant. But honestly, I don’t think so.