Now and Later Task Management

Just finished listening to the podcast on project management basics - now and later task management.  I've been on a lot of projects that have super complicated gantt charts that try and predict a 23hr task 5 months from now, which has always seemed to me to be highly flawed, so the now/later approach to tasks has a lot of appeal.  Throw in a baselined schedule that can only be changed through a change management process, earned value, etc and schedules leverage way too much bureaucracy that creates risk and raises cost.  I've seen company guidelines that require the schedules to have tasks that are less than one week.  Again, problematic when the project runs a year or longer.

But on the other side, the draw to do gantt charts is driven by the need to rationalize a project's ability to hit a particular date and know when people will need to come on board.  So I'm having troubles reconciling the later need with the former inability to predict.

The projects I've been responsible for or on have ranged from $.5M to $2M.