Personal Information Management

Do you have a personal information management plan? Have you ever thought about how important or useful having one in place could be? I constantly debate writing one up, and I will likely do so. The thought of having loose ends floating around the information super highway bothers me for a number of reasons.

When I think about personal information management, I think not only about the messy computer desktop I keep or the files that sit around in folders (or not) on my hard drive but I also think about those old blogs, the unused Twitter accounts, unused or underused delicious accounts and aol instant messager accounts, abandoned gmail accounts, and more. In an era where we have more and more digital toys to play with, it gets overwhelming to keep track of everything — how many times have you gotten locked out of an account because you can’t think of the password you created years ago? How many people have you met through digital networking on one social site but failed to connect with on another site? Or how many people do you know exclusively through one site and thus only maintain a presence because of them? Do you avoid new sites because you’re overwhelmed with what you have now?

In the physical world, we have some heuristics for cleaning and purging: we know the milk is sour after a certain date, that the sweaters you haven’t worn in two years should likely be donated, and that you need to change your car’s oil every 3,000 miles. The same should happen in the digital world, though it’s certainly something we should each think about and plan out for ourselves. For example, my desktop gets cluttered very quickly because when I download a .pdf file, it’s easier to keep it on my desktop than to put it into a deep folder construction. But a week or two later, my entire desktop is covered. It would make sense for me to set a timeline for keeping items on the desktop and then taking action on each item, whether it’s to remain on the desktop, move to a folder, or be purged. Of course, the same would go for items within the folders on my desktop, and then from there, items that should be backed up on remote storage.

With my digital information, the same should be done for these old email addresses, web 2.0 tools and accounts, and websites. While I love the fact I still have access to the livejournal I created when livejournal first started, all of the files within those journals should be downloaded and backed up elsewhere if they’re that important. All of the important emails in abandoned accounts should be either downloaded and stored elsewhere or forwarded to one account where they can be properly archived and tagged. Delicious bookmarks? It would make sense to either put them all in one place and use tags or bundles to denote the bookmarks. That MySpace account I created 5 years ago I deleted after realizing my only use for it was keeping in touch with one person who had refused to get on board with facebook (which is a much more secure, less buggy, and more user-friendly site). But more than just doing these actions, it makes sense to me to write a plan of future action to ensure that I am regularly monitoring my digital activity so that my trail is clean and controllable.

Although online reputation isn’t the first thing I think about when I think of personal information management, I do think about the impact of my information management on productivity and  control over my own digital footprints. There are so many fantastic tools and toys out there to play with, but without being conscious of how wide your footprint is, you can easily become overwhelmed. I know I have. I’m constantly on the search for new tools to streamline my digital life and while some are really useful (including, but not limited to the vast amount of Google’s tools), I get way leery of letting one or two or three companies/products/tools have control over my digital life. While it’s convenient and a very streamlined process for allowing Google, et al. to do the information management for me, it’s also putting myself at the whim of any of these companies to exploit, lose, or manipulate my digital life. With, too, the advent of things like profiles in Google, this becomes a bigger and bigger reality of the ever-expanding world wide web.

I care deeply about what I do online and I care enough to worry about how to maintain my information. For me, it’s my job to be in control and on top of what I’ve got out there and what I want out there. I plan on a thorough cleaning soon, followed by the development of a personal information management policy. And not only will I develop it, I plan on following it. I suspect not only greater leaps in productivity, but more willingness to try out new things (knowing that I’ll have a plan for deleting those abandoned accounts after a certain time frame) and more overlap in the people with whom I cross digital paths. That’ll only lead to better network building, stronger connections, and more utility from my online presence.