The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 1. William Jones

is made between a personal task and a personal project or, simply, task and project. For task, we can use a simple, intuitive definition: A task is something we might put on a “to-do” list.“Pay bills,” “Call mom to wish her a happy birthday,” “Make hotel reservations” are all examples of tasks. With respect to everyday planning, tasks are atomic. A task such as “Make hotel reservations” can be decomposed into smaller actions—“Search for hotels in downtown area,” “Select hotel,” “Search for room,” etc.—but there is little utility in doing so. A task can usually be completed in a single sitting but often stays on a to-do list of pending tasks for long periods awaiting the requisite information. We can’t make hotel reservations, for example, until we know the dates of the trip and the location of the meeting.

      A project, in turn, is made up of any number of tasks and sub-projects. Again, the informal “to-do” measure is useful: While it makes sense to put tasks like “Call the real estate broker” or “Call our financial planner” on a to-do list, it makes little sense to place a containing project like “Buy a new house” or “Plan for retirement” into the same list (except perhaps as an exhortation to “Get started”). A project has an internal structure of inter-dependent sub-projects and tasks and can last for weeks, months or even years.

      Task management as used in recent studies of human-computer interaction³² refers primarily to the management between tasks including handling interruptions, switching tasks and resuming an interrupted task. Project management, on the other hand, refers primarily to the management of various components within a project³³. For the project to be successfully completed, many or most of these components must also be completed, in the right order, at the right time. In planning a family vacation, for example, it’s important to make plane reservations but not before travel dates and destination are determined.

      The informal task and project management that people perform as part of their everyday practice of PIM frequently differ from the more formal “industrial strength” task and project management ³⁴, which is done (sometimes by managerial fiat) in an organizational setting and done also on occasion by highly disciplined individuals. People may use tools like the task module of Microsoft Outlook ³⁵ or the web-based remember the milk ³⁶ application for task management. But tasks are more commonly managed through more ad hoc methods, for example, “in our heads” or through notes scribbled on paper or through self-addressed email messages³⁷. Projects too are frequently planned in our heads (e.g., as we’re driving to work), or through notes quickly written to paper or an electronic document. Also, the folder structures people develop to hold project information can serve as a rough representation of project—its structure and current state of completion³⁸.

      There is an important point that may already be obvious to many of you: task/project management and information management are two sides to the same coin. We manage (or should manage) our information with an end in mind—how will this information be needed and used later?³⁹ In some cases, a use is clear. We keep a slide presentation inside the “XYZ conference” folder because we’ll be presenting the slides at the “XYZ conference.” Folder organization in this case is a rough reflection of an anticipated reality. But this presentation may have other users later on that we don’t foresee. The presentation may, for example, form the basis for another presentation we’ll give later in the year at the “ABC conference.” And for other kinds of information such as digital photographs, the use may be years, or decades, from now. Even so, we may file the photos according to features we think we’re likely to remember, for instance by the year in which the photographs were taken or under a name for an associated event (e.g., “Sue’s 50th birthday party”).

      Conversely, our efforts to plan a project or to prioritize and complete a set of daily tasks should also impact our management of related information. In fact, the structure of your project, with its various tasks and sub-projects, can form the basis for the organization of related information. A folder that implicitly represents the task to make “hotel reservations” can also contain information concerning hotel alternatives and a reservation confirmation for the hotel actually selected⁴⁰.

      Two sides of the same coin. The same also holds true for our efforts to manage our life’s resources—our money, energy, attention and—the only non-replaceable, non-renewable resource—our time. We can’t effectively manage these without also managing associated information—our account and credit card statements and our calendars.

      The PIM perspective gives us a stronger statement still: In a digital age of information, the very management of our tasks, our projects, our money, energy, attention and time are exercises in information management. We “see” our future by looking at the calendar(s) we keep. We feel richer or poorer after looking (on-line) at our checking account balances or the current prices of the stocks we hold. As we do so, we are not looking at and working with the “things” directly. Instead, we are looking at and working with information for these things.

1.4 A SHORT HISTORY OF PIM

      Here is a newspaper-style history of PIM.

      Ancient times. Great new device released called the “human brain.” Everyone gets one for free but without an owner’s manual. Enormous capacity for storage but input and output can be especially difficult. Development of mnemonic techniques is underway but essential rhyming pattern awaits the invention of buns and shoes.

      The ultimate device of PIM was and still is the human brain—with capacities of associative storage and retrieval far exceeding that of our devices—current and conceivable. Various mnemonics⁴¹ are essentially information management as applied to human memory.

      Since ancient times, human-generated information has taken various external forms from cave drawings to clay tablets to parchment and papyrus to paper. For each form have come tools for writing, storage and retrieval. Tools need to be invented. Consider the vertical filing cabinet—around as long as any of us can remember but invented nevertheless⁴².

      The 1940s: Information is a thing to be captured and measured!

      A theory of communication is developed which lays the groundwork for a quantitative assessment of information⁴³. Information can be measured for its capacity to reduce uncertainty. The modern dialog on PIM begins with the publication of Vannevar Bush’s “As we may think” article at the close of World War II (1945). Bush proposed a fanciful “Memex” as “an enlarged intimate supplement to (a person’s) memory” (p. 6).

      The 1950s: The computer moves from metaphor to modeler of human thought.

      Newell and Simon pioneer the computer’s use as a tool to model human thought⁴⁴. Inspired by a computational metaphor, Broadbent develops an information processing approach to human behavior and performance (1958).

      The 1960s. Mind trips through hypertext, intelligence augmentation and human cognition.

      After the 1950s research showed that the computer, as a symbol processor, could “think” (to varying degrees of fidelity) like people do, the 1960s saw an increasing interest in the use of the computer to help people to think better and to process information more effectively. Working with Andries van Dam and others, Ted Nelson, who coined the word “hypertext,” was part of a team that developed one of the first hypertext systems, The Hypertext Editing System, in 1968⁴⁵. That same year, Douglas Engelbart also completed work on a hypertext system called NLS. Engelbart advanced the notion that the computer could be used to augment the human intellect⁴⁶. In a similar vein, Licklider discussed the potential for a “Man-Machine Symbiosis” (1960). As heralded by the publication of Ulric Neisser’s book Cognitive Psychology (1967), the 1960s also saw the emergence of cognitive psychology as a discipline in its own right—one focused primarily on a better understanding of the human ability to think, learn and remember.

      1970s & 1980s. A phrase is born.

      The