Karl Voit has a lovely paean to Org mode in which he recounts his journey to Org in a years-long quest to organize his life and maintain a knowledge database. I’m sympathetic. I started with a Rolodex and a pocket full of index cards. Years later I find myself, like Voit, spending the majority of my tube time in Org mode.
Voit is an expert on personal information managers and has spend a considerable amount of time building up his work environment. He suggests an often proffered but frequently ignored piece of advice for using Org mode: start off with one or two simple functions—note taking, say—and add more functionality as the need arrives. Bernt Hansen’s excellent Org Mode – Organize Your Life In Plain Text! is an excellent place to see what Org can do. It’s short enough the read the whole thing but comprehensive enough to show you what’s possible and to serve as a go-by for implementing your own workflow.
As Voit says, one of the major benefits of Org—besides its power—is that the data format is plain text. You can, if you like or need to for some reason, write an Org document with any editor, even echo if it comes to that. That’s a huge advantage because it means you don’t have to worry about being locked into proprietary data formats that might stop being supported sometime in the future. That’s one of the main reasons I feel comfortable living in the Apple ecosystem: all my data (other than specialized data such as pictures and PDFs, which are also in open source formats) are plain text so if I have to leave Apple for some reason, I can take all my data with me. I largely have Org to thank for this.
If you’re an Org user or wondering if you should be, take a look at Voit’s post. It’s an interesting read.