In my particular case it doesn’t work well to over-separate dates and planning from thinking and producing, and I happen to find modal widgets a bit slow and encumbering, so I use TaskPaper 3 – a fast and highly scriptable plain text outliner, which includes tags and very sophisticated filtering.
More generally, however, perhaps the software you happen to use is better thought of as a gym than a fully-serviced cruise trip ? The real trick is not so much to ‘find a system’ and escape into nirvana as to simply build capacity.