Planning, deadlines and time management

I'd say planning has become more necessary, not less, precisely because so much of modern work is unstructured. When your job is mostly a list of things nobody has scheduled for you, the planning has to come from you or it doesn't happen at all. That said, I think there's a limit past which planning turns into procrastination — people build elaborate systems as a way of avoiding the difficult first task. The people I know who actually deliver things tend to plan roughly and start early, rather than plan perfectly and start late. Schools could help by teaching estimation explicitly: most students, and most adults, are genuinely bad at guessing how long something will take, and almost always guess low.