I use emacs-dashboard to show an overview of my work when I start Emacs. It looks a little like this:

Emacs dashboard

The weekly agenda gives me a quick glance of what's scheduled for the week ahead, as well as any upcoming deadlines, but I wanted to tweak it slightly to remove some non-useful information.

I use the WAITING keyword to mark tasks that are waiting on someone else and don't require my attention. I have a separate agenda command to show me all WAITING tasks and there's no need for these to show on my dashboard.

The dashboard package provides a couple of different ways to customize the agenda view. One of those is dashboard-match-agenda-entry, which uses org-mode's tag and property matching to filter tasks.

Limiting the dashboard agenda looks like this: 

;; Match just one TODO keyword.
(setq dashboard-match-agenda-entry
      "TODO=\"TODO\"")

;; Match multiple keywords.
(setq dashboard-match-agenda-entry
      "TODO=\"TODO\"|TODO=\"IN-PROGRESS\"")

;; Match everything except WAITING.
(setq dashboard-match-agenda-entry
      "-TODO=\"WAITING\"")

There is a lot more to org-mode's matching system; I've used it to create custom views for displaying my monthly goals, but it can be used to match tags, categories, and even properties like Effort.