Tools for Thought's greatest benefit
In this article, I'll share my point of view about the greatest benefit of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) applications and Tools for Thought (TfT) in general. And it's not what you may think!
Tools for Thought (TfT) tools, also known as Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tools, are often described or thought of as means to enhance thinking. While that statement is true to a certain degree (writing does help think more deeply), the main benefit I see and feel with those tools is elsewhere.
While our society and technology changes and improves all the time, our biological nature limits us to a much slower pace of evolution. Our brains are still mostly "designed" for survival. That's probably why we have such a limited short-term memory. No need to remember a gazillion things when the focus needs to be on the danger we face.
Human brains do have an impressive capability to retain all sorts of information, but they're not the best tools available to us. They're not reliable enough. We may work hard and train ourselves to memorize certain information, but there's no guarantee that we'll always be able to find that information back. Memory retrieval is flaky. It's a very annoying issue that we all face from time to time. We also tend to forget a ton of things all the time. And the more we age, the worse those problems get.
