I love the way that org-mode allows you to add simple clean structures to your text, with lists and tables. You can get some of that functionality in other modes by using orgstruct-mode and orgtbl-mode, which are part of org-mode.

Enable these minor modes in any major mode for one-off use with M-x orgstruct++-mode or M-x orgtbl-mode and you can use the normal org-mode commands to create lists and tables. I find this especially useful in emails, so I use this code in my emacs config file to automatically enable these for message-mode

;; use org structures and tables in message mode
(add-hook 'message-mode-hook 'turn-on-orgtbl)
(add-hook 'message-mode-hook 'turn-on-orgstruct++)