Do I need to start living in Emacs to get these benefits? Or are you saying I can use Emacs as my todo list app, close it after writing a todo, and have it pop up notifications?
Emacs will happily run in the background.
You start using it for the agenda and TODO lists, learn it has spreadsheet functionality that ties in with the arbitrary-precision calculator, start taking notes and exporting them to PDF via LaTeX, writing reports in it with your company letterhead, merging your contacts list, migrating your email into Emacs, and next thing you know you find yourself fifteen pairs of parentheses deep in a custom elisp function that tweaks the date format for that one manager that insists on yy/dd/mm whenever you send your weekly progress report.
Not that I'd know anything about that.
But living in Emacs is more the sort of thing you get to do, not the sort of thing you'd need to do ;)
I use orgzly revived with it.
Org mode could do with a bigger non emacs ecosystem, though.