I find that often, having a tool that enhances something you never did doesn’t make you start doing that thing.

But there are exceptions. I never had an address book or calendar until I had a Palm Pilot. It might have just been that I was becoming an adult at the time, but part of it was probably a barrier to use factor. The Palm was a small thing I could carry to class, keep near my phone, bring to my internship job, etc. It and the need for organizing did conspire to make it my first real organizer and my first time having that information organized at all.

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.

Totally agree about there being exceptions. I never wore a watch, but when my wife got me an Apple Watch it became a huge utility to me to filter notifications to see only important things I cared about and it made me more productive to have one.

I read a lot of ebooks on mine.

We used to put ebooks on it to help us during university exams. I pretended it was a calculator. I know, I’m ashamed, but it was for a boring course on economics.

I was the opposite. I used it as a calculator, without adding any ebooks on top, but my professors were uneasy about it. Then I got a calculator to curb their anxiety.

I remember when calculators were the Forbidden Fruit because, according to maths teachers, we were "not going to be walking around with calculators in our pockets all the time."

For simple stuff, incl. calculus, I agree with them. This was for other courses, which prioritize methodical correctness rather than math knowledge, like physics and chemistry.