I also struggled with procrastination during my PhD so I use org-mode to implement the pomodoro method to great success. My notes actually document exactly what times I worked on each point.

I've used it to document figures for publishing papers. The org file explains how each figure is made and reproduces the figures and intermediate data when executed. I freely mix programming languages.

Org-mode is the digital lab notebook that I have needed forever. I have a private repo with one folder per general project and one or more org files inside. I mostly treat them as append-only FILO pipes.

PI wants a progress report? Export the relevant headings to a PDF and email it.

I want some literate-programming style "work in progress"? Easy, you can even hook jupyter in, and dump plots out simply. Export it to a PDF if you want, or make it a blog post with some nice HTML styling.

Project documentation? easy.

Paper drafts? Yup.

It's wonderful.

As you note, org-mode text is just special plaintext, no different from Markdown (other than being rather more powerful).

And of course folks should want to use emacs, or a similarly-powerful editor in which it's possible to build something like org-mode. Why use worse tools when better ones are equally available?

What org is very good at is treating HTML, LaTeX, markdown, etc. as, effectively, compilation targets.

`C-c C-e h h` : spits out foo.html

`C-c C-e l p` : spits out foo.tex, foo.pdf.

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes

Not sure how that could be improved without adding a lot of complexity :(

You could always try to convince everyone else to use org within a git repo. I'm serious: a decentralised VC system with structured text files is basically the centralised-project-tool killer.

And it's free. And it means everyone using emacs!

So, in case you were serious: there are good reasons to use more visual and collaborative tools in a team, one is that people won’t learn emacs just to be able to work with others and I personally don’t really care what editors my coworkers use, another reason is that non-engineers are also part of the team, and another one is that JIRA/Trello/etc support integration in others tools (GitHub, Slack, etc.).

I was semi-serious, semi-joking about how wonderful it'd be for everyone on a team to use emacs. It really is the best editor in existence, and it really is usable by anyone, not just developers. And it integrates with git[0], GitHub[1], Slack[2] &c. too!

[0] https://magit.vc/

[1] https://github.com/vermiculus/magithub

[2] https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack

EDIT: I also have been using it for documentation. Github parses orgmode files, so its useful for me and the rest of me team in these cases.

I haven't used org mode for all the other cool things it can do, but I remember watching a great video about someone who uses it a lot like a Jupyter notebook.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-dUkyn_fZA&feature=youtu.be

       dp
       dp
       ||
      _||_
     ' || `      ~/
     ) || (     //
     _)::(_    //
     ) || (   //
    (  \/  ) //
     `-..-' /'

https://orgmode.org/manual/Capture-templates.html

- taking any sorts of notes

- agenda stuff

- word processing (through export to latex)

- todo lists, long-term shopping lists

- literate programming (my .emacs is in org mode, also many scripts in my notes)

- bookmarking (I have links to gnus threads to look at later, links to related documents in agenda entries or notes, links to servers I ssh into, links to some commands I run often, etc..)

and probably other things I don't remember ATM. Incredibly useful tool.

More seriously, there're https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode & https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer — but even more seriously, take a look at emacs + evil-mode (which make emacs a vim-clone, but an easily- & pleasantly-extensible vim-clone).