Personal Information Management (PIM) is known as "the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use personal information items". I like this definition; it's simple and efficient. However, I wasn't entirely happy with it as it completely leaves human nature out of the equation (we aren't robots after all). Gathering information isn't so methodical; it can be messy and frustrating.

While doing research for this post, I could not find enough information on personal information management that thoroughly explained to me the thought processes that go into actually managing personal information. I found plenty concerning the actual technology tools you can use to organize your information but nothing on how to actually process information or find what is relevant to you.

If you want a good introduction to personal information management, I recommend William Jone's book Keeping Found Things Found (even though some of technology mentioned is outdated, the concepts in the book are still good).

Courtesy of tametheweb.com

Why should we care about personal information management? PIM goes beyond just organizing information. Look at the role PIM plays in lifestyle design. You gather information every single day in your life. You are constantly processing information whether you are consciously thinking about it or not (which is why I find the brain to be the sexist organ in the human body.  How can you not love that power?).

Anyway, how do you find information that is relevant and important to you? And how did you react with that information? What emotions did you feel? How is this information going to impact your life? Obviously, you may not ask all of these questions when you find information, but in the context of lifestyle design,  these are some extremely important questions to ask. I will continue to explore PIM and its relationship to lifestyle design in later posts.

Until next time!

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