  Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of
the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store,
organize, maintain, retrieve, use, and distribute information in each of its
many forms (paper and digital, in e-mails, files, Web pages, text messages,
tweets, posts, etc.) as needed to meet life's many goals (everyday and
long-term, work-related and not) and to fulfill life's many roles and
responsibilities (as parent, spouse, friend, employee, member of community,
etc.). PIM activities are an effort to establish, use, and maintain a mapping
between information and need. Activities of finding (and re-finding) move from
a current need toward information while activities of keeping move from
encountered information toward anticipated need. Meta-level activities such as
maintaining, organizing, and managing the flow of information focus on the
mapping itself. Tools and techniques of PIM can promote information integration
with benefits for each kind of PIM activity and across the life cycle of
personal information. Understanding how best to accomplish this integration
without inadvertently creating problems along the way is a key challenge of
PIM.

Human-Computer Interaction;Computers and Society