Managing personal information: tactics, strategies and outcomes

Whilst previous research reports a range of individual behaviors for managing personal information, less is known about the relationships between these behaviors. Knowledge workers are known to: manage more or less, either file or pile, use more or less sophisticated classification, manage sooner or later, and delete or retain. We undertake research to better understand the totality of users’ behaviors in dealing with information, investigating user preferences, patterns of adoption, effectiveness of current PIM solutions, and outcomes from investment in management effort.

We discover nine robust but diverse clusters within the overall statistics that reliably explain 80% of the behaviors reported by users. These clusters describe some very different behavioral strategies that differ both in effort invested and tactic preferences. We suggest that these clusters describe behaviors learned over many iterations of managing and retrieving. We also find that deleting items is actually somewhat detrimental, that users are only somewhat successful and satisfied when re-finding information, and are less successful when retrieving older information for reuse. Additionally, users who managed more actively reported only moderately better success at retrieval time and that sophisticated filing systems were somewhat more helpful when retrieving for reuse.