Actually you can use org-mode without that much of a learning curve (at least in its basic form). Just pick an Emacs distribution (doom, spacemacs, ...) which come with pretty handy defaults, create an org-file and that's it. I use org-mode myself and didn't take the time to "learn" Emacs. This Google talk[0] was pretty handy to get familiar with org.
0: youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM