Problems & Strategies of Information Keeping and Management

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Problems & Strategies of Information Keeping & Management

Keeping

Every human keeps or stores information. Some keep their information organized, others not. People encounter huge amounts of information daily, too much to store it all. There are various costs that prevent us from storing all the information we receive.
The more information we keep, the more management is required to keep all the information organised. Information needs to be organised so that people can obtain value from it. As with Management, exploitation is also a cost of storing all available information.
Information of low value should not be kept because it only makes the process of information retrieval more difficult. Keeping a massive amount of items can be distracting when manual search is used to find the relevant information.

People acquire large amounts of information daily, such as E-Mail, Bookmarks, Contacts, Photos etc. & they must decide which to keep & which are irrelevant & should be disposed of. But people find it difficult to make a decision whether to keep or to dispose information. A theory of why people rather want to keep information is because it might prove useful in the future.
To know what information to keep & what information to dispose of, one has to determine the future value of information. Determining the future value of information is difficult as the human being tries to reason about hypothetical situations, in which, they are very poor*.
The decision to keep or dispose of potential future information is prone to two types of mistakes, information isn’t kept & is not available when it is needed & keeping irrelevant information can make a person feel guilty about being disorganised.

The world is moving away from paper & beco...

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...This process is often repeated.

Users have problems in the processing of informational messages. Observations have shown that people spend large amounts of time trying to organize these messages.
A possible solution may be to create folders for informational messages, but creating dedicated folders for informational messages is hard for several reasons. Generating folders need considerable effort & filing is cognitively difficult.
Successful filing of informational information is highly dependent on the user’s ability to know if they will need they information in the future.

Web information is largely not actionable but informational. One form of management is bookmarking certain web pages. Other strategies include printing pages, people sending themselves links in their email, copying links to documents, generation of sticky notes or the use of cognitive memory.

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