I have some difficulty justifying the organizational effort involved in this. I've yet to come across a compelling feature of Org mode over, say, a bunch of unstructured text files. It seems like the main benefit is to be able to write blog posts about it.

My journal, for years, has been a word document with dates at the top of each entry, and I've yet to come across something I wanted to do that couldn't be handled by this system.

I found the organization of org-mode made it easier to build/stick to the habit of logging my ideas and activity. I like the idea of org-mode being the place to go for my notes. The outline and tagging style makes sense to me and how I think.

The earlier comment about 20 hours is a bit intimidating. I'm sure there is tons of useful operations and shortcuts I have still to learn, but the quick and simple outlining work for me. Once I got the hang of a few of the keyboard shortcuts it was trivial to just sit down and type (with the exception of copy-paste vs kill-yank).

tags (metadata) for items aren't available in either word documents or plain text documents. a couple keystrokes filters down on tags in org mode. this is a huge value add - think searching photos or bookmarks with/without tags - this can't be done easily in word/plaintext

there's no comparison between navigation/searching in word documents vs. emacs. that may be fine for a mostly write setup, but i'm actively interrogating and reviewing my items - this isn't easily with 1 huge word file, or multiple word files per date, or whatever setup you have.

> tags (metadata) for items aren't available in either word documents or plain text documents. a couple keystrokes filters down on tags in org mode. this is a huge value add - think searching photos or bookmarks with/without tags - this can't be done easily in word/plaintext

Sure it can. If I embed images in a document file along with the text, then Ctrl+F lets me search for that text, which makes it easy to find adjacent images. I tend not to put a lot of images in there, but in practice this works fairly well for the images I do include.

You're also only looking at the benefits of your strategy, without looking at the costs. The cost is, you have to tag things. My strategy works without me tagging anything. I wouldn't be surprised if you can find things slightly faster, but I would be very surprised if this time savings outweighed the time spent tagging.

If it's fun for you to tag things then it's not a cost, so I'm certainly not criticizing anyone using Org mode. Do what you enjoy. I'm just saying it's more of an aesthetic choice than a productivity choice.

This is similar to the various "blog like a hacker" tools out there such as Jekyll or Haunt. People cite all these supposed benefits like version controlling your posts and whatnot, but ultimately the vast majority of successful blogs, including the "hacker" ones, use Wordpress, Blogspot, or something similar.

The underlying point I'm making is that the temptation with highly flexible tools is to spend all your time tinkering with configuration for the tool, rather than doing the thing the tool is intended to do. Some people can avoid that temptation, but I'm not really one of those people.

(Random aside: my file is actually an Open Document Format file (.odt) not a Word Document. It originally was a Word Document, but hasn't been for years, so I'm not sure why I wrote that.)

Same here. The advantage of Org is that it is likely to be around forever, and it's plain text.

And it offers some very nice interpreters to be used on top of plain text. For example, agenda views can support any workflow you can possibly imagine, from a daily planner to a kanban, without needing to write Elisp.

Org, and in general Emacs have this very nice feeling of giving you tools to build whatever you want. In contrast to much more rigid GUI applications.

Though to be honest Word is likely to be around forever as well - insofar as "forever" means current computing equipment. In a world where you can't open a Word document is probably a world where we aren't able to read plain text documents either.

After all, Word documents are "just" a series of compressed xml files. Even the open source alternatives will allow you to recover text in the event you lose access to Microsoft products.