Personal information management


Personal information management is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use informational items such as documents, web pages, and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks and fulfill a person's various roles ; it is information management with intrapersonal scope. Personal knowledge management is by some definitions a subdomain.
One ideal of PIM is that people should always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet their current need. Technologies and tools can help so that people spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone clerical activities of PIM. But tools and technologies can also overwhelm people with too much information leading to information overload.
A special focus of PIM concerns how people organize and maintain personal information collections, and methods that can help people in doing so. People may manage information in a variety of settings, for a variety of reasons, and with a variety of types of information. For example, a traditional office worker might manage physical documents in a filing cabinet by placing them in hanging folders organized alphabetically by project name. More recently, this office worker might organize digital documents into the virtual folders of a local, computer-based file system or into a cloud-based store using a file hosting service. People manage information in many more private, personal contexts as well. A parent may, for example, collect and organize photographs of their children into a photo album which might be paper-based or digital.
PIM considers not only the methods used to store and organize information, but also is concerned with how people retrieve information from their collections for re-use. For example, the office worker might re-locate a physical document by remembering the name of the project and then finding the appropriate folder by an alphabetical search. On a computer system with a hierarchical file system, a person might need to remember the top-level folder in which a document is located, and then browse through the folder contents to navigate to the desired document. Email systems often support additional methods for re-finding such as fielded search. The characteristics of the document types, the data that can be used to describe them, and features of the systems used to store and organize them are all components that may influence how users accomplish personal information management.

Overview

The purview of PIM is broad. A person's perception of and ability to effect change in the world is determined, constrained, and sometimes greatly extended, by an ability to receive, send and otherwise manage information.

Senses in which information is personal

Research in the field of personal information management has considered six senses in which information can be personal and so an object of that person's PIM activities:
  1. Owned by "me", e.g., paper documents in a home office, emails on a personal account, files on a personal computer or in the personal store of a Web cloud service. Preservation of this information especially for the longer-term and for legacy raises issues of personal archiving. The increasing digitization of personal information raises issues of digital preservation.
  2. About "me". This refers especially to information kept by others such as credit records, health records, search history, etc. Such information can greatly impact a person's reputation, treatment and ability to get things done and raises major issues of privacy.
  3. Directed toward "me", e.g., e-mails, phone calls, drop-ins, TV ads, web ads, pop-ups and including, even, self-interruptions. The management of incoming information raises issues of attention management: It can sometimes have critical importance but at other times, it can distract and derail a person's efforts to get things done. Information filtering systems have the potential to increase the relevance to the person of incoming information but at the potential cost of reinforcing a person's prejudices and preconceived notions or of filtering out information that the person should experience.
  4. Sent/Posted by "me", e.g., sent e-mails, personal websites, blog posts, social media posts, published reports and articles. Information provided by a person – deliberately and inadvertently – can prove decisive in the impressions that others form of this person.
  5. Experienced by "me", e.g., Web history, photos, journal entries, full-motion videos from head-mounted cameras and other efforts to lifelog. The increasing use of tools that keep a time-stamped record of a person's activities and bodily states either explicitly or implicitly has given rise to notions of a quantified self.
  6. Relevant to "me"—a catch-all category that includes information of potential relevance to a person e.g., information a person does not know about but ought to know about. Recommender systems, which learn a person's preferences either from explicit ratings or, implicitly, from a person's past selections, have the potential to make a person aware of information the person might not otherwise know about or think to search for. More conventionally, a person's network of friends, family and colleagues can provide a means for the person to incidentally encounter information of relevance.

    Personal space of information and personal information collections

An encyclopaedic review of PIM literature suggests that all six senses of personal information listed above and the tools and technologies used to work with such information combine to form a personal space of information that is unique for each individual. Within a person's PSI are personal information collections or, simply, collections. Examples include:
  • photos, digital or paper-based, possibly as organized into albums, virtual or physical;
  • digital documents organized into folders and subfolders
  • emails, organized into email folders or, possibly, left in an ever larger inbox;
  • paper documents relating to personal finances and possessions, as organized into the hanging folders of a traditional vertical filing cabinet.
  • digital songs as organized through application such as iTunes.

    Activities

Activities of PIM – i.e., the actions people take to manage information that is personal to them in one or more of the ways listed above – can be seen as an effort to establish, use, and maintain a mapping between information and need.
Two activities of PIM occur repeatedly throughout a person's day and are often prompted by external events.
  • Activities to find move from a current need toward information to meet this need. If a person is asked by a colleague "When is the staff meeting?", for example, the person may meet the need by checking in a calendar of scheduled events.
  • Activities to keep move from encountered information toward anticipated need. A person may, for example, receive an email and flag as "high priority" or "read later" depending upon the message's assessed importance.
Meta-level activities focus more broadly on aspects of the mapping itself.
  • Activities to maintain and organize focus on personal information collections such as a person's inbox, photo collection, or the digital documents in a personal file system. Included are efforts to delete or archive information that is out-of-date or no longer used, efforts to update file formats, and efforts to create backups of information to secure against loss. Also included are efforts to create an organizing structure in support of keeping and re-finding.
  • Activities to manage privacy and the flow of information include, for example, decisions concerning privacy settings in a social media application such as Facebook and efforts to manage email subscriptions and efforts to filter incoming email.
  • Activities to measure and evaluate include efforts to assess the time effectiveness of a practice of PIM e.g., "Am I spending too much time in email?"; "Is this folder structure worth the trouble it takes to maintain?"
  • Activities to make sense of and use information focus on the decisions to make and the actions to take for a collection of information, once gathered. For example, among the choices available in new automobiles, which will best meet a person's needs? Or what is the overall picture of health that emerges from all the data kept by a fitness tracker?
PIM activities overlap with one another. For example, the effort to keep an email attachment as a document in a personal file system may prompt an activity to organize the file system e.g., by creating a new folder for the document. Similarly, activities to organize may be initiated by a person's efforts to find a document as when, for example, a person discovers that two folders have overlapping content and should be consolidated.
Meta-level activities overlap not only with finding and keeping activities but, even more so, with each other. For example, efforts to reorganize a personal file system can be motivated by the evaluation that the current file organization is too time-consuming to maintain and doesn't properly highlight the information most in need of attention.

Information items, forms, and fragmentation

Information sent and received takes many different information forms in accordance with a growing list of communication modes, supporting tools, and people's customs, habits, and expectations. People still send paper-based letters, birthday cards, and thank you notes. But increasingly, people communicate using digital forms of information including emails, digital documents shared, blog posts and social media updates, text messages and links, text, photos, and videos shared via services such as Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and Instagram.
People work with information items as packages of information with properties that vary depending upon the information form involved. Files, emails, "tweets", Facebook updates, blog posts, etc. are each examples of the information item. The ways in which an information item can be manipulated depend upon its underlying form. Items can be created but not always deleted. Most items can be copied, sent and transformed as in, for example, when a digital photo is taken of a paper document and then possibly further transformed as when optical character recognition is used to extract text from the digital photo, and then transformed yet again when this information is sent to others via a text message.
Information fragmentation is a key problem of PIM often made worse by the many information forms a person must work with. Information is scattered widely across information forms on different devices, in different formats, in different organizations, with different supporting tools.
Information fragmentation creates problems for each kind of PIM activity. Where to keep new information? Where to look for information already kept? Meta-level activities, such as maintaining and organizing, are also more difficult and time-consuming when different stores on different devices must be separately maintained. Problems of information fragmentation are especially manifest when a person must look across multiple devices and applications to gather together the information needed to complete a project.