Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use informational 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.
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 (such as looking for and organising 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.
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.
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.
[6] As information was increasingly rendered in paper form, tools were developed over time to meet the growing challenges of management.
[17] The 1980s also saw the advent of so-called "PIM tools" that provided limited support for the management of such things as appointments and scheduling, to-do lists, phone numbers, and addresses.
For example, efforts to find information may be directed by a personally created outline, self-addressed email reminder or a to-do list.
Under a "berry picking" model of finding, information is gathered in bits and pieces through a series of interactions, and during this time, a person's expression of need, as reflected in the current query, evolves.
Lansdale[17] characterized the retrieval of information as a two-step process involving interplay between actions to recall and recognize.
People may take the trouble to create Web bookmarks or to file away documents and then forget about this information so that, in worst case, the original effort is wasted.
[56] The keeping decision can be characterized as a signal detection task subject to errors of two kinds: 1) an incorrect rejection ("miss") when information is ignored that later is needed and should have been kept (e.g., proof of charitable donations needed now to file a tax return) and 2) a false positive when information kept as useful (incorrectly judged as "signal") turns out not to be used later.
For example, the ability to take a digital photo of a sign, billboard announcement or the page of a paper document can obviate the task of otherwise transcribing (or photocopying) the information.
[70] Activities of finding and, especially, keeping can segue into activities to maintain and organize as when, for example, efforts to keep a document in the file system prompt the creation of a new folder or efforts to re-find a document highlight the need to consolidate two folders with overlapping content and purpose.
[77][78][79] At the same time, these stores offer their owners the opportunity, with the right training and tool support, for exploitation of their information in new, useful ways.
The Planz[51] prototype supports an in-context creation and integration of project-related files, emails, web references, informal notes and other forms of information into a simplified, document-like interface meant to represent the project with headings corresponding to folders in the personal file system and subheadings (for tasks, sub-projects, or other project components) corresponding to subfolders.
What, for example, are the personal information privacy implications of clicking the "Sign Up" button for use of social media services such as Facebook.
People often have difficulty managing or even navigating a variety of paper or electronic medical records across multiple health services in different specializations and institutions.
People are also frequently engaged in other meta-level activities, such as maintaining and organizing (e.g., syncing data across different health-related mobile apps).
[93] The techniques and preferred methods of a person's PIM practice can vary considerably with information form (e.g., files vs. emails) and over time.
[32][95] A person's practice is also observed to vary in significant ways with gender, age and current life circumstances.
), has proven a very useful, but expensive method of study with results bound by caveats reflecting the typically small number and narrow sampling of participants.
As what is better described as a methodology of tool design rather than a method, Bergman reports good success in the application of a user-subjective approach.
Sub-areas of cognitive science of clear relevance to PIM include problem solving and decision making.
[105] To take another example, the signal detection task[106] has long been used to frame and explain human behavior and has recently been used as a basis for analyzing our choices concerning what information to keep and how – a key activity of PIM.
Information in support of GIM activities can be in non-digital forms such as paper calendars and bulletin boards that do not involve computers.
[117] Concerns of data management relate to PIM especially with respect to the safe, secure, long-term preservation of personal information in digital form.
However, knowledge is not a "thing" to be managed directly but rather indirectly e.g., through items of information such as Web pages, emails and paper documents.
PKM is best regarded as a useful subset of PIM[118] with special focus on important issues that might otherwise be overlooked such as self-directed efforts of knowledge elicitation ("What do I know?