[lloeki]

The key difference for me was that I didn't always have my notebook/agenda on me/at hand, so writing things was haphazard and unreliable (either I tried to remember and failed or I noted it down but consistently lost the random piece of paper I used as a fallback) whereas when I got a Palm device I always had that device at hand.

It all boiled down to the physical paper tradeoff: small filled up quickly/was too constraining a space, bigger was impractical to lug around anywhere.

So arguably I had sort of a broken system in place already but it became very intermittent to the point of being nonexistent in practice because of the constraints. Palm devices allowed me to fully realise the system.