Keeping Found Things Found — William Jones
The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management
Quick Summary
Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management is the first comprehensive book on new ‘favorite child’ of R&D at Microsoft and elsewhere, personal information management (PIM). It provides a comprehensive overview of PIM as both a study and a practice of the activities people do, and need to be doing, so that information can work for them in their daily lives. It explores what good and better PIM looks like, and how to measure improvements. It presents key questions to consider when evaluating any new PIM informational tools or systems.
My Thoughts
I was disappointed by this book, which seemed interesting at first, but ended up being vague, repetitive, very theoretical and too detailed. I also hadn’t looked at the year it was published before reading it, and it turns out that this book is now a little out of date.
It’s very detailed and precise, but that’s precisely what makes it impractical. For readers who need to write a thesis on PIM, it may be interesting, but it’s not for the average reader.
Also, in the end, the book offers very few solutions to the problems it presents. After reading it, I wondered how I could improve my current setup, and in fact I simply couldn’t find any improvements to make, because the book doesn’t present any solutions.
It’s one of the few books from which I retained almost nothing, because there’s far too much useless information compared to useful information. The little that could have been useful isn’t, because it talks about things and features that are now present in our devices,
There are still a few interesting elements that I took note of, but compared to the time spent reading the book, they’re not worth it.
In short, I wish I hadn’t wasted my time with this book. I was expecting a lot from it…
To Read or Not to Read
I do not recommend reading this book. Sometimes, even if I don’t like a book, I don’t regret reading it, but this time there is nothing to gain from it, and the book is definitely not up to date. It is too long to read for what it offers.
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