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

(posted) by me,” “experienced by me” or, at the most general level, “relevant to me.” Information in each of these senses is personal though for distinctly different reasons.

      We gain from a management of personal information in each of these senses in accordance with the life we wish to lead. Likewise, we lose if personal information lays unmanaged or is managed by others in ways that work against us.

1.1 A DEFINITION OF PIM

      Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to both the practice and study of the activities a person performs in order to locate or create, store, organize, maintain, modify, retrieve, use and distribute information in each of its many forms (in various paper forms, in electronic documents, in email messages, in conventional Web pages, in blogs, in wikis, etc.) as needed to meet life’s many goals (everyday and long-term, work-related and not) and to fulfill life’s many roles and responsibilities (as parent, spouse, friend, employee, member of community, etc.)⁵.

      The definition is broad and formal. But for our purposes, a more informal, working definition will often suffice. Mary Parker Follett, writing at the turn of the last century, defined management (of people) as “the art of getting things done through people.”⁶ Make a small substitution and we have: PIM is the art of getting things done in our lives through information.

      PIM is not (just) about getting back to information we have experienced before, i.e., refinding, nor is it just about being better organized. We can think of people who are well organized—to a fault—but who appear no better able to manage either their information or their lives as a result. Conversely, we may know people who in their offices and their homes appear quite disorganized but who always manage, somehow, to stay on top of things.

      We will review evidence from several sources to the point that organization does, in fact, matter. But not just any organization or organization for its own sake. Rather, organizing as a PIM activity should help us to make sense of and use our information. Organization should be towards one ideal of PIM: to have the right information at the right time (and in the right form, of good quality, …) to meet our needs⁷.

      Or consider another ideal: Organizing information and other PIM activities are an integral and welcome part of our daily lives, not a separate chore to be guiltily postponed to “tomorrow.” How might this be? Consider the screenshot in Figure 1.1 taken of a Web site for an amusement park in Sweden. Try it out (in a Web browser of your choice). The view in Figure 1.1 is animated. Cars and trains go back and forth. Carnival rides spin. Animals in the open air zoo move. Flags flap in the wind. Waves lap up against the beach. The water in the pool shimmers. Nothing fancy, but inviting and fun to look at, and functional. A click on the pool, for example, provides information concerning showers, changing rooms and places to eat nearby.

      Can we imagine something similar as a kind of dashboard overview for our lives and our information? In the center might be a representation for home and family. Nearby might be representations for work and career, for health and fitness. Farther away there might be a snowcapped mountain or a beach to represent an interest in skiing or a vacation we hope to take. We might zoom in for greater focus on a specific area in our lives or a specific project.

      The animation might change appearance to reflect important changes in our world. Clouds on the horizon might signal the imminent arrival of rainy weather; extra cars might represent a real traffic jam on our way to work. Items might change in color or increase in size to reflect looming deadlines.

Figure 1.1: Surely PIM is important but is it amusing?⁸

      Such an animated “PIM dashboard” is certainly feasible even now and even more so as the computational power of our devices continues to improve. Whether the dashboard is merely a novelty or has enduring utility depends upon the nature of its implementation, the nature of our information needs and the nature of our natures as well.

      A bigger point is that our visions of PIM should not be constrained by conventional images of a desktop or a file cabinet. Our informational overviews can be much richer and much more evocative. And a bigger point: PIM is not only necessary and important. It might even be fun.

1.2 WHO BENEFITS FROM BETTER PIM AND HOW?

      PIM may be “personal” but better PIM promises to bring broad societal benefit.

      Within organizations, better PIM means better productivity as employees develop a clearer understanding of their information needs and the ways in which tools and techniques of PIM can address these needs. Such an understanding can also facilitate better teamwork and better group information management⁹.

      Progress in PIM is evidenced not only by better tools but also by teachable strategies of information management of direct relevance to education programs of information literacy¹⁰.

      People generally become more forgetful and their working memory span (the number of things they can keep in mind at one time) decreases with advancing age. Better PIM can translate to compensating tools and strategies of PIM to support our aging workforce and population.

      The challenges of PIM are especially felt by people who are battling a life-threatening illness such as cancer even as they try, as nearly as possible, to live their lives and fulfill their roles as parent, spouse, friend and, even, as they try to maintain their jobs and profession-related activities. Better PIM can help patients manage better in their treatments and in their lives overall¹¹.

      But certainly better PIM benefits people, regardless of their special circumstances. There is little chance you could be reading these lines were information and external forms of information (email messages, web pages, newspapers, this book) not of great importance to you in your everyday life.

      Consider two kinds of people: information warriors and information worriers. Information warriors see their information and their information tools as a strategic asset. Information warriors are willing to invest time and money to keep up with the latest in mobile devices, tablet computers, smartphones, application software and anything new on the Web. For an information warrior, information technology is, so to speak, a profit center.

      On the other hand, information technology for information worriers is a cost center. New offerings in mobile devices, new releases in operating system or application software, … new developments in the alphabet soup of Web-based initiatives—these and other developments in information technology represent more time and money that needs to be spent just to keep up with everyone else. Information worriers may have a nagging feeling they could do better in their choice of supporting tools and strategies. But they don’t know where to begin.

      Even if these descriptions are stereotyped, many of us can probably think of people we know who come close to each description. Perhaps you are an information warrior or an information worrier. Or perhaps you are a little of both.

      For the simple fact is that even if we embrace new developments in information technology, we must recognize that we don’t have time in the day to learn about all the latest developments. We need a basis for deciding whether a new tool or a new way of doing things is likely to work for us. We’d like to avoid an extended investment of money and, more important, time to learn the use of a new tool or strategy only then to conclude belatedly that it won’t work for us.

      Better PIM starts by asking the right questions. Better PIM means that each of us becomes a student of our practice of PIM.

1.3 RELATED FIELDS AND RELEVANT TERMS

      PIM is a practical meeting ground for many disciplines including cognitive psychology/cognitive science, human-computer interaction (HCI), library and information science (LIS), artificial intelligence (AI), database management and information