The beauty of orgmode is that you don't need to learn everything to start using it, actually, you can just start with your typical workflow and look for stuff as you need.
Recently, I came back to it just to use for code/programming notes and instead of trying to organize all the code into source blocks I went the other way and added in my own comments and questions in blocks that can be toggled on/off around the code that's there. Now the only org syntax I really use from org-mode is `#+BEGIN:` blocks for comments/questions I can quiz myself on and occasionally headlines when I want to organize something because it's in the way of reading the plain text. If I gave advice to someone new to it it would be to start with just plaintext notes and only add what you really need. You can quickly go overboad once you are trying to figure out how to do footnotes, file linking, exporting w/ images, source code execution, etc.
"Distraction free" apps don't work, because I frequently need to switch windows a lot and need some fancy features.
Really, the answer for me is to work on staying focused. (Perhaps a lobotomy would help.) But it isn't a problem with my tools.