Taking notes is the simplest. I started with outline-mode back in the day. Once you start taking notes you'll think: if only I had a way of cataloguing, tagging and prioritising tasks. Before long you'll start estimating tasks and creating agendas; then you'll want to tie in other parts of your life to your tasks and notes -- as nothing ever lives in a vacuum -- and... well, there you go. That's how it goes.
Create a .org file and start writing is really the simplest. If you never make it past that, you still have an effective note taking system in Emacs.
For me it was org-babel[1] that finally sucked me in. For example, I keep notes of various shell invocations as source blocks. Also various one-off SQL queries. Org-mode tables are surprisingly powerful too. Basically, a lot of things that I used to do occasionally are now contextualized and embedded in my notes.
Tables are fairly easy to extract from org-files, even with some sed/awk function, e.g. `getOrgTable() { awk -vT=$1 '/^#\+NAME: /&&$2~T{f=1;next};/----/{next};!/^\|/{f=0};f' $2 ; }`
The above should work for most tables, and you get back a pipe-separated-values output, that you could further refine with e.g. http://harelba.github.io/q/ to get tsv,csv output support and SQL query capabilities.
I regularly SQL-Query with INNER JOINs over tables in various org-files stored on multiple servers in one commandline using this combination.
My scripts are a dirty combination of ideas/concepts of both of the above, that work for me depending on situation/use-case, but that I should clean up one day, and gist someplace.
I can give more info, if the above doesn't give enough pointers yet for you to dig yourself further towards "your solution".
