Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform 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.); it is information management with intrapersonal scope. Personal knowledge management is by some definitions a subdomain. 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). But tools and technologies can also overwhelm people with too much information leading to information overload. A special focus of PIM concerns 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, a traditional office worker might manage physical documents in a filing cabinet by placing them in hanging folders organized alphabetically by project name. More recently, this office worker might organize digital documents into the virtual folders of a local, computer-based file system or into a cloud-based store using a file hosting service (e.g., Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive). People manage information in many more private, personal contexts as well. A parent may, for example, collect and organize photographs of their children into a photo album which might be paper-based or digital. 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.
Overview The purview of PIM is broad. A person's perception of and ability to effect change in the world is determined, constrained, and sometimes greatly extended, by an ability to receive, send and otherwise manage information.
Senses in which information is personal Research in the field of personal information management has considered six senses in which information can be personal (to "me") and so an object of that person's PIM activities:
Owned by "me", e.g., paper documents in a home office, emails on a personal account, files on a personal computer or in the personal store of a Web cloud service. Preservation of this information especially for the longer-term and for legacy raises issues of personal archiving. The increasing digitization of personal information raises issues of digital preservation. About "me". This refers especially to information (sometimes referred to as personal data) kept by others such as credit records, health records, search history, etc. Such information can greatly impact a person's reputation, treatment and ability to get things done and raises major issues of privacy. Directed toward "me", e.g., e-mails, phone calls, drop-ins, TV ads, web ads, pop-ups and including, even, self-interruptions (e.g., interrupting a work task to check a sports score). The management of incoming information raises issues of attention management: It can sometimes have critical importance but at other times, it can distract and derail a person's efforts to get things done. Information filtering systems have the potential to increase the relevance to the person of incoming information but at the potential cost of reinforcing a person's prejudices and preconceived notions or of filtering out information that the person should experience. Sent/Posted by "me", e.g., sent e-mails, personal websites, blog posts, social media posts, published reports and articles. Information provided by a person – deliberately and inadvertently – can prove decisive in the impressions that others form of this person. Experienced by "me", e.g., Web history, photos (taken by others as well as by "me"), journal entries, full-motion videos from head-mounted cameras and other efforts to lifelog. The increasing use of tools that keep a time-stamped record of a person's activities and bodily states either explicitly (e.g., Fitbit or the Apple Watch) or implicitly (e.g., through Web page browsing, emails and texts) has given rise to notions of a quantified self. Relevant to "me"—a catch-all category that includes information of potential relevance to a person e.g., information a person does not know about but ought to know about. Recommender systems, which learn a person's preferences either from explicit ratings or, implicitly, from a person's past selections, have the potential to make a person aware of information the person might not otherwise know about or think to search for. More conventionally, a person's network of friends, family and colleagues can provide a means for the person to incidentally encounter information of relevance.
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