# Personal Information Management (PIM) Information that is within our personal sphere (i.e., relates to ourselves and our family). PIM is the management of that information Parts: - Intentions: life goals, goals, vision, projects, milestones - Productivity: Calendar, time blocking, time management, tasks, processes, automations - Control: planning, periodic reviews - Behaviors: routines, habits, rituals, practices, patterns, exercise, meditation, focus, attention, control - Information: inspiration, ideas, knowledge, contacts, project information, articles, books, poems, etc - Files and documents: photos, digital documents, paper documents, videos, email, music, bookmarks, books, podcasts, search history, location history, chat history, voice recordings, source code, designs, etc - Reference structure - Personal Space of Information (PSI) - Personal Information Collections (PICs) - PIC - PIC - PIC - ... ## The three PIM activities [[William Jones]], one of the founders of the field, splits PIM into three kinds of activities in [[Keeping Found Things Found (Book)|Keeping Found Things Found]] (2007): - **Keeping**: deciding what to save, and how - **Finding and re-finding**: getting back to the information you need, most often something you've already seen - **Meta-level** work: organizing, maintaining, and managing the flow of information I find this split really useful because it shows where most of the work actually happens. The title of the book is Jones' thesis: the hard part is finding again what you once found. Put differently, every decision to keep something is a guess about what you'll need later. Keep too little, and something useful is gone. Keep everything without a title, a type or a link, and the clutter makes every other note harder to find. That's the [[Collector's fallacy|collector's fallacy]] again, seen from the research side. And re-finding only works if you stored good retrieval cues at keeping time: the words, context and links you'll have in mind when you search later (see the [[Encoding specificity principle|encoding specificity principle]]). ## Files and piles One of the oldest PIM studies, [[Thomas Malone]]'s 1983 study of how people organize their desks, showed that people keep information in **files** (titled and ordered) and **piles** (untitled, arranged by location). Classifying is hard, so things end up in piles. His answer was [[Deferred classification|deferred classification]]: capture now, classify later. ## References - https://pim.famnit.upr.si/wiki/index.php/PIM_definitions - Reference to explore: https://pim.famnit.upr.si/wiki/index.php/PIM_definitions - Jones, W. (2007). *Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management*. Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 9780123708663 - Malone, T. W. (1983). How do people organize their desks? Implications for the design of office information systems. *ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems*, 1(1), 99-112. https://doi.org/10.1145/357423.357430 ## Related - [[William Jones]] - [[Keeping Found Things Found (Book)]] - [[Encoding specificity principle]] - [[Collector's fallacy]] - [[Thomas Malone]] - [[Deferred classification]] - [[Why You Can't Find Your Notes - The Science of Re-finding Information (Article)]]