Journal = useful
I think that Journal works best when you customize it. For example, I have a lot of meetings to keep track of. I have a paper checklist for these meetings, but I like to play around on the computer as well, so I incorporated my checklists into Outlook. For each board meeting, I call the board members to find out if they will attend the meeting. Past experience has proven the need to document everything about these calls. I use Journal to do that. I have a customized Journal view for each board for which I organize meetings. It's table format, and it lists each board member, whether or not they said that they would attend (members who plan to attend are in bold), the date and time that I confirmed their attendance (you can put in your own dates and times; you're not limited to the automatic dating), and any applicable notes, such as who I actually talked to (an assistant, etc.). I have the views set up so that I only see the applicable month's confirmation info at a time.
When it's time to make my phone calls, I pull up the appropriate board member distribution list in Contacts and do a "New Journal Entry for Contact" as I make the call. I enter the confirmation info, select the appriopriate board in my categories list, and save. On meeting day, I print off my list (downside: I have to change the title each time since I'm dealing with so many different boards), so that when everybody is late to meeting, I can answer questions about who said that they would be there.
ETA: If a board member responds via e-mail, I simply copy the e-mail to Journal, add a category, and it shows up on my confirmation list as well.
I can upload a print screen of what it looks like, if anyone's interested.
I also use Journal as a simple journal. If I want to remember when I had a conversation with a co-worker about a project, I create a journal entry and add the details there so that it is easily accessible. These entries can easily be linked to other Outlook items and vice versa.