What is personal information?

In the course of their activities, professionals and managers encounter a variety of information that can be conveniently expressed as a short piece of text, that we call an item. An item might represent (for example) an idea, task, reminder, or fact. Typically, an item consists of a single phrase or a sentence and has little or no formal internal structure.

Some examples of items are:

• Call Fred on Tuesday about staff meeting.
• Hotel Bonaventure guaranteed late arrival 2/31 confirmation #148729. Meet Mr. Silver and John Pell 6:30 in lobby, dinner at Chez Albert 7:15.
• Consider new approach to pricing--"book club" model with giveaways.
• Expect sales report from Sally next Wed.
• Cleaners: pick up three shirts, drop blue suit.
• John Milton believed that free will existed so that loving God would be meaningful.

An individual may handle several items in a single day and have hundreds or even thousands of "active" items that need to be stored, organized, and scanned regularly.

While much of the information that individuals need to manage is short and self-generated, sometimes the granularity is larger and comes from other sources. An individual may need to index or organize larger bodies of text such as memos, reports, messages, or news stories. it is useful to associate such objects with items ' where the item may be a topic, summary, source, or headline describing the text. We call such bodies of text notes.

To cope with the task of organizing items and notes, individuals group them into sets--typically in the form of an ordered list or file. The items/notes then can be manipulated conveniently as a unit. We call these sets categories and say that the items/notes are assigned to categories.

A representative range of categories for one individual is:

• Phone calls
• Things to read
• Errands
• Special dates and birthdays
• Bring from home to office
• IEEE speech notes
• Proposed picnic dates
• Program bugs
• Accomplishments for next performance appraisal
• Major upcoming expenses
• High priority
• Fred Smith
• Pricing policy committee
• Important concepts of Western philosophy

When many categories are defined, the categories take on special significance they provide the concepts for organizing and understanding the information at higher levels of abstraction. The set names become the words of a language, which can describe the information and its interrelationships. This language can capture salient features of the universe of the information, reflecting the "real world" from which they are drawn.

When items/notes can be assigned to multiple categories, an individual can alter his or her focus to reflect different perspectives by organizing the same information in multiple ways. We call each such organization a view. This is difficult to accomplish with physical storage methods (such as paper in files), where each item or note exists in a unique place.

Most people are unaware of the volume of information they manage on a regular basis, because they use a variety of mechanisms for this purpose. The style of management is highly individual, but often includes such aids as note cards, rolodexes, yellow Posted notes, while-you-were-out messages, and lists on paper that are recopied on a regular basis. In general, personal information is too ad hoc and poorly structured to warrant putting it into a record-oriented on-line database.