So....what are your feelings now on goals. I like @Oogiem's approach. Sometimes, having weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. goals can be more frustrating as things come up and you have to constantly rewrite your goals.
Mixed feelings. I like goals and planning but two things happened in my professional life that undermined my confidence in goals and planning:
And that is why having a solid GTD system allows one to quickly change course, with new Areas of Focus, Projects, and Actions. Being flexible and able to respond appropriately in 2017 and beyond I believe is a vital skill! GTD helps us along the way with having a rock-solid, trusted system that allows us to quickly adapt. Cheers!
Totally agree. A responsible professional cannot make such career shifts without a complete inventory of projects that he has to close. It must be a fast but controlled shutdown.
As the farmer in question I came to GTD from a Covey system. Covey did do well to help me define the big picture, one reason I have written out scenarios for what I want things to be like in 5-10-25-100 and 500 years. Yep, I do have a 500 year plan for what I want our farm to look like, what I want society to be doing, how I want things to be operating. That's the sort of long term goal I review regularly. But those long term "Why am I here? What should society do?" type questions filter back down into concrete projects and actions I manage using GTD. 
I feel that the majority of people are lacking this sense of purpose and don't ask the "Why am I doing this?" question very frequently. This might not be such a bad thing but for the fact that it means that they can be exploited by people who do have a sense of purpose (to exploit others).
I inherited the farm, one of my projects was one started by my mother over 30 years ago. It took me over 7 years to complete but it's done now. It won't have to be redone in my lifetime, in fact what I did on it should be good for 75 years or so. A lot of farm projects are long term, that is my biggest change from "traditional" GTD to my system. I deal with and handle long term projects frequently. I'm also a big believer that if you know the larger pictures you can always find a way to take that one step along the path. You may never get there but you sure won't get there if you don't start. So I start, by creating smaller projects that push toward that vision of the world as I want it to become.
From the first link:
I've experienced this phenomenon many times and I've attributed it to not having goals rather than having them. If I pursue something because I just feel I want to do it then that's fine, but without a goal then it's all too easy to ask the question "Why am I really doing this then?" and the answer is demotivating. I suspect the answer is to have goals and review them at appropriate intervals (as defined by GTD for goals at different levels of horizon) to ensure that they are still on purpose. I'm personally finding this very difficult, after many years of GTD my 40,000ft level is still pretty much blank.
In my opinion it is a very, very, VERY BAD example given by the author. Why?
Maybe the "hidden purpose" could be the realisation that the marathon runner doesn't actually like running after all. This would be good information, no? (If the runner did like running then setting a new goal to achieve a full marathon would surely be an obvious next step)
Maybe I'm crazy or weird but:
