Karl Voit has reposted an article from 2018 on using Org-mode to organize your life. Voit, as many of you know, is very interested in personal information managers (PIMs) and curating information for later retrieval. He says that when he discovered Org-mode, he knew he had found a tool to last him a lifetime. Partly that’s because the functionality is so rich and extensible but mainly because everything is in text.
Having everything in text future proofs Org mode because the files will always be readable by any application that can deal with ASCII or UTF-8. To be sure, you won’t have all the display and processing capabilities outside of Emacs but the files are still readable and easy to translate into any format.
Voit compares Org-mode to a box of Lego blocks. Everyone can take whatever blocks they want from the box and build a customized work environment tailored exactly to their workflow. Voit says he spends about 90% of his computer time inside Org-mode. That seems a lot but Org enables so many different workflows from literate programming, to document preparation, to record keeping, to blogging, to handling agendas and itineraries that it’s easy to use it for just about everything.
Org-mode is probably the most important part of my workflow and I wouldn’t want to do without it. If you aren’t already using Org, take a look at Voit’s post to get an idea of why you might want to.