Comment by Lyngbakr
3 years ago
I really like Org Mode, but I only need a tiny amount of its functionality. Emacs is my editor of choice anyway, so it's convenient to use Org Mode for my personal daily to-do list and backlog. And not even for a specific workflow system (e.g., GTD or whatever), just tasks with scheduled dates, deadlines, and some custom states. Agenda view is neat, too. That's plenty for me. It always impresses me though when I see how much others can do with it!
Likewise, re: "subset that I find useful". As I note in the post, I've never used it for TODOs etc.
What keeps me in the org life is that whenever I've wanted to do X, orgmode itself and the wider ecosystem have answered "sure, here you go".
And, personally, any learning curve + configuration overhead has been worth it because it composes as a unified system. My brain fares poorly if it has to jump between contexts for a single task (e.g. write lecture/talk notes, separately make a slide deck to present, separately make a live notebook / repo to run a demo, and then have to bounce between the three at run-time).
I don't know... each to their own. This works for me, and I wish others tools that work for them. Life is too short for the annoyance borne of bad-fit personal tools.
edit: clarify opening line