Ten Reasons Why

One of my ongoing pain points is managing the crapload of information I have to track. To do lists just don’t cut it for me and I’ve managed to narrow my Inbox down to about 1500 items (and about 1800 in Sent Items). Manually organizing them into the several hundred folders I now have in Outlook has ceased to be productive. So here’s my request: does anybody know of an alternative to Lotus Agenda that is affordable (preferably free or at least has a free trial) built on relatively modern (e.g. post-DOS era) technology for Windows?
Remember Lotus Agenda from way back in the DOS days? That would be the perfect tool. And, yes, I know you can still dig it up online, but I’m not so desperate (yet) that finding it and dealing with the awkward install and lack of documentation just to be stuck in DOS hell outweighs the Outlook hell I’m in now. If you don’t know what Lotus Agenda was/is, here’s a description [source]:

A typical Agenda screen is divided into three columns: one in which you enter the specific piece of information (”Call Mom,” “Sell Yahoo stock,” “Memorize Hamlet,” etc.), one for date, and one for priority. Those left-side specific pieces of information can be further divided into categories (”Calls,” “Memos,” “Ideas,” etc.). Without doing any manipulation of your data structure, then, Agenda lets you view your data in four ways: organized by category, specific piece of information, date, and priority. Then you can assign your specific pieces of information to more than one category. And without noticing it, any words in a specific piece of information that are also names of categories automatically are filed into that category as well as any others you want to stick it into. For example, if you have categories called “Mary,” “Sally,” and “Sales” and you have a specific piece of information that reads “Tell Mary that Sally needs sales reports today,” the item will automatically show up into those three categories–plus, because you used the word “today,” Agenda will file the item by date, too.
This may seem like a lot of redundancy, but it turns out to be an efficient way of storing and deploying information. By placing specific items into multiple categories, any view you choose will reveal all relevant items. In other words, Agenda manages its database of information in the opposite way of traditional databases. In relational database-management programs like Access and Paradox, you build a structure for your data first. Only after the structure is set can you enter data. With Agenda, you input your ideas while they’re hot, and then work with the program to figure out where they belong in your structure-in-progress.

And, yes, I know Chandler is supposed to be able to provide some of that functionality, but since it’s a really thin 0.2 release at this point, that doesn’t help me much.
Ideas?

Greg Other