Consider PlanPlus 4 for Outlook
My "Geek" credentials are virtually non-existent, but I can't fathom why Outlook should raise your risk of contracting a computer virus any more than any other Windows e-mail client. It is widely reported that most viruses are written for the Windows operating system, but for the simple reason that only a minuscule portion of the world's computers are non-Windows. Virus writers go where the action is. (And if I recall correctly, the number of Macintosh viruses out there is way out of proportion to their Windows counterparts when taking the installed user base into account.) I have fortunately remained virus-free (knock on wood) but I keep the anti-virus software up-do-date and empahtically do not open attachments from unknown sources.
I used Franklin-Covey software products for a number of years, going back to an early version of Ascend. Principally, I suppose, because I was using their paper-based planners when I converted to digital. Their products always had a Daily Record of Events (now Daily Events) which I found useful for capturing miscellaneous notations and bits of information that I wanted a record of but didn't have another logical place to put it. (Get out another file folder to put it in, make a label and file it... never to be seen again? Are you kidding?) It was always a simple matter to record those kinds of things on the daily events page, and then use the search capabilities of computers (one of the primary advantages of going digital) to recover the information later. If I ever needed to recover it. I have eleven years worth of these daily events in my Outlook file, and the file is relatively small.
I went from Ascend to whatever they replaced it with (FC Planner for Windows, I think) and then to PlanPlus for Outlook when e-mail became an important component of our workflow. With Outlook, I have the core essentials for a planning system: a calendar, task ("next action") lists, contact information, e-mail, and note-taking capability. All in one place, which I consider essential. And since Outlook has become a de facto standard, other useful applications are made to integrate with it. I use MindManager for quite a few things, including organizing large, longer-term, more complicated projects. It can export tasks to Outlook, and synchronize tasks with Outlook. So too can OneNote, and since the larger, more complicated projects tend to require organizing a lot of notes and information, I'm using MindManager and OneNote together for them, but all tasks and schedules eventually get filtered down to Outlook.
I went from PlanPlus for Outlook to PlanPlus 2 for Outlook, but ended the string at PlanPlus 3. PlanPlus 3's project planning facility was quite enticing, but PlanPlus 3 slowed Outlook to a crawl, and was balky and unstable. I reverted to PlanPlus 2, largely out of habit and for the usefulness of the daily notes (really, just a special Outlook Journal category). It was still a little slow and unstable, but not nearly as much as PlanPlus 3.
Three weeks ago, I did a major overhaul; removing all vestiges of the Franklin-Covey software--and the Netcentrics GTD add-in--for a relatively plain-vanilla Outlook with a few customized views, a la Michael Leinenberger, plus Lookout and Clear Context. Then, I got the e-mail from Franklin-Covey announcing PlanPlus 4.
Seemingly against my better judgment, I installed it on a laptop to see if it could be made to work. It seemed to work fine, and a day or two later I installed it on my mission-critical desk computer, which has twice the memory the laptop has. I've been using it for a little over a week now, and I'm liking it. There is a little bit of a performance drag, but on my system it's less than I experienced with PlanPlus 2 and infinitely better than Planplus 3. The "Home" screen is the slowest to load, since it has to filter out so much information from different folders. It may take 3 or 4 seconds to load. The Project view usually loads in a second or two. I'm finding it especially useful.
PlanPlus 4 adds quite a few features to Outlook, so it must be a fairly large and complicated program. Still, it doesn't do everything I would like, and I've had to make a few work-arounds. But it's better than what I had before. If you want to keep some of the FC functionality, you might want to give it a whirl. (They have free 30-day trials.) The one caveat is that folks in the past have reported difficulties removing all vestiges of the Franklin-Covey add-ins from their systems. (The same is true with the NetCentrics GTD add-in.) FC has downloadable files you can use to do a more thorough job of removing earlier versions than the Windows Uninstall does. I don't know if they have such a thing for PlanPlus 4, and this is something you might want to check into. But if you encounter difficulties, their e-mail support seems to be quite thorough and responsive. And it's free.
