The ever awesome Sacha Chua has an excellent Baby Steps Guide to Managing Your Tasks with Org. It’s still a work in progress but even in its unfinished state it’s a really useful guide for getting started with Org mode.
One of problems with Org is that it can be overwhelming. Org can do so much and has so many facets that it’s easy for beginners to bog down trying to understand everything. Chua’s guide takes the approach of learning to do just one thing with Org: manage your TODO lists. By the time you’re finished mastering that, you will have learned enough about Org and how it works that it will be easy to move on to the next set of Org features.
Chua starts off by having you create a list of tasks and shows how you can manipulate that list by moving tasks up and down in the file. When you’re done she says to change the TODO to a DONE. That’s kind of a bore, though, so she shows you how to toggle it with a simple key sequence. But maybe you want more states than just TODO and DONE. You might want WAITING or SOMEDAY, for example. Chua shows you how to add these and assign speed keys to them so you can switch states easily.
Next she suggests that you break that list of tasks up into projects. That makes it a bit easier to organize your tasks and track progress on individual projects. Finally, she shows you how to schedule tasks for a certain date.
If you’ve been wanting to get started with Org, Chua’s tutorial is an almost painless way of getting started and learning to use Org for a useful task at the same time. Definitely recommended.