Gavin Freeborn posted a video in which he argues that Org-mode is easy. The reason it’s easy, he says, is the same as I’ve often written: You don’t have to learn it all or even large parts of it to make effective use of it. It has so many aspects that it’s possible to treat them almost as disjoint applications. There’s the outlining functions, the TODO/agenda functions, the write once publish everywhere functions, the code block/literate programming functions and much, much more.
Serendipitously, Freeborn’s video offers proof of this, at least to me. He demonstrated some of the features that were most useful to him and those features are not the ones I find most useful. I don’t even use some of his “most useful features”. This despite the fact a huge portion of my Emacs work is done in Org-mode.
So, as I’ve said before, the way to learn Org-mode is to use one tiny aspect of it to solve a particular problem. Once you’re comfortable with that, use some other aspect to solve another problem. After a while, you’ll find that you’ve learned most or even all of Org. I’ve heard lots of people say they couldn’t get into Org or didn’t see the point but I’ve never heard someone who knows Org decide it wasn’t worth it. Believe me, it is worth it.
The video is 19 and a half minutes long so plan accordingly.