Faced with scarcity, people naturally plan. It is necessary to be efficienct when resources are few.

• Going on a camping trip with limited food, you'll have to decide what to eat when
• Knowing you only get one hour to study for some exam, you'll want to know what the most effective study methods are to extract the most out of this hour
• Constrained by a budget (e.g. your own money), you will aim to get the best deals you can; with tooling, you will want to buy quality things that you won't have to soon replace

On the other hand, abundance can lead to great waste in time, energy, and resources.

Simulating Scarcity

Schedules and structuring time can be used to make "artificial scarcity"; you can trick yourself to being more efficient by imposing scenarios on yourself that necessitate planning.

• If you make a plan to eat only one meal per day, you will want to plan to eat something that tastes good and is nutritious. You may arrange your social life around enjoying this one meal with other people.
• You may alot different time blocks for studying different subjects; e.g. focus on studying for one exam for an hour, working on another project for two, etc.
• Your budgeting plan may amount to deciding to save a certain portion of the money you bring in on a fixed interval.

Degrees of Freedom

Of course, having the flexibility to change/adjust plans to meet new requirements (or ride waves of inspiration) is a helpful thing.

What needs to be done is to strike a balance between having enough structure to keep one motivated/working/productive and enough freedom to capitalize on unforseen events. Good organization is organization that makes sense to do, which you don't have to constantly think about.