Personal Information Management

Personal information management (PIM) is the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use personal information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill a person's various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.). More simply, PIM is the art of getting things done in our lives through information.

Practically, PIM is concerned with 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, an office worker might manage physical documents in a filing cabinet by placing them in folders organized alphabetically by project name, or might manage digital documents in folders in a hierarchical file system. A parent might collect and organize photographs of their children into a photo album using a temporal organization scheme, or might tag digital photos with the names of the children.

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 (e.g., search by sender, subject, date). The characteristics of the document types, the data that can be used to describe them (meta-data), and features of the systems used to store and organize them (e.g. fielded search) are all components that may influence how users accomplish personal information management.

Studying, understanding, and practicing PIM can help individuals and organizations work more effectively and efficiently, can help people deal with "information overload", and can highlight useful strategies for archiving, organizing, and facilitating access to saved information.

There are six ways in which information can be personal:

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 such as personal information managers help people spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone activities of PIM (such as looking for and organising information). They then have more and better insight in making creative, intelligent use of their time, or to simply enjoy the information itself.

...
Wikipedia