When I need to find a document on my computer, I navigate through folders rather than search for it. Even though search seems more efficient. For years, I assumed this was just habit or stubbornness. I believed newer technologies like desktop search and tagging systems would eventually replace my manual organization methods.
According to research by Bergman and Whittaker, this preference isn’t random or irrational. It’s rooted in how our brains work. When we navigate folders, we use ancient brain structures that have evolved for physical navigation. Search, by contrast, requires verbal processing resources that are far more limited.
What looks like technological backwardness turns out to be cognitive wisdom. Our brains have spent millions of years perfecting navigation and only decades with search.
Table of Content
About the Book
The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff upends everything we thought we knew about organizing our digital lives. Through rigorous studies involving thousands of users, Bergman and Whittaker reveal why we stubbornly stick with folders despite supposed better alternatives like search and tagging. The book introduces “curation” as the missing framework for understanding personal information management, explaining what we do with our files, emails, and photos and why we do it. Most importantly, it translates these insights into practical design principles that work with our brains instead of against them. It shows how personal information tools should be built for real humans, not idealized users.
About the Authors
Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker have spent nearly two decades solving the mysteries of how people manage their digital stuff. Bergman brings sharp experimental precision to understanding user behaviour. At the same time, Whittaker, a Professor at UC Santa Cruz with previous stints at Bell Labs and IBM, blends academic rigour with real-world application. They’ve published over forty pioneering papers that shaped our understanding of personal information management. Their complementary perspectives, bridging psychology, information science, and computer interfaces, give this book its unique power to explain why we organize our digital worlds the way we do.
Practical Takeaways
Organizational Strategies That Work
File Management Techniques
Email Management
- Separate actionable from informative emails
Treat emails requiring action differently from those that are just informative. - Keep actionable items visible
Use your inbox as a to-do list for items requiring action, or create a specific “action required” folder that you check regularly. - Don’t create too many email folders
Research shows that too many email folders (especially tiny ones with just 1-2 messages) don’t improve retrieval and can hinder it.
Collaborative Information Management
Personal Information Management Mindset
These takeaways reflect both the empirical research findings presented in the book and the practical implications of the user-subjective approach to personal information management developed by the authors.
Core Thesis
Personal Information Management (PIM) is fundamentally different from other types of information management, requiring unique theories, research approaches, and design principles that recognize the subjective, self-directed nature of how individuals curate their personal digital information.
Key Points
Contextual Framework
The authors position PIM as a distinct field requiring its own theoretical foundation. They draw upon cognitive psychology to explain user behaviors and preferences, and employ cognitive neuroscience to understand underlying mechanisms of information organization and retrieval.
The work emerges during a period of significant technological change (2010-2016), with rapidly expanding personal digital collections and evolving tools for organizing and accessing digital content. The authors frame PIM as fundamentally a self-directed communication process, where users organize information for their future selves, contrasting with traditional information management designed for others to access.
Part I: Personal Information Management: The Curation Perspective
This section establishes the theoretical foundation for understanding PIM as curation rather than consumption. The authors argue that current information theories focus almost exclusively on discovering and consuming new public information, overlooking how people manage their collections.
Chapter 1: Personal Archives and Curation Processes
The authors introduce the concept of information curation—how individuals select, organize, and access personal collections. They present a communication metaphor for PIM: unlike traditional information management, where an information professional organizes for different users, PIM is “a solipsistic interaction between a person and him- or herself at two different times.” This allows for subjective organization methods that might not make sense to others.
The chapter defines personal information as anything users preserve for future access and establishes the three-stage curation lifecycle: keeping, management, and exploitation. It identifies key properties of information items that affect curation:
Chapter 2: Keeping This chapter examines how people decide what information to keep.
The authors note that making decisions is difficult because it requires predicting future needs. Studies across different media (paper, email, contacts, photos, web) show people tend to “overkeep” due to:
For actionable items (like emails requiring response), keeping patterns are different from informative items. In practice, the “one-touch” ideal of immediately processing and discarding items rarely happens. Studies show that people keep about 70% of emails, with actionable messages almost always retained until completion.
Chapter 3: Management
This chapter explores how people organize their information. Management requires predicting how one will think about information at retrieval time—a difficult cognitive task. The authors distinguish between:
They contrast filing (systematically categorizing into hierarchical folders) with piling (less structured organization, often chronological). Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Filing requires more upfront effort but potentially offers a better retrieval structure, while piling requires less effort but may reduce findability as collections grow.
Management strategies vary by information type. Email requires different approaches for actionable versus informative messages. Photos often receive minimal organization, which causes later retrieval problems. The authors also note the influence of personality traits on management strategies.
Chapter 4: Exploitation
This chapter discusses how people retrieve their personal information. Unlike searching for new information, exploitation involves familiar, personally organized information. The authors identify two main strategies:
Their research shows that folder structure affects retrieval success and efficiency. Shallow hierarchies with moderately sized folders (around 10-20 items) optimize retrieval. For email, opportunistic strategies (scrolling, sorting, searching) are more prevalent than folder-based retrieval. Photo retrieval for older photos is often unsuccessful due to poor organization. Web page retrieval surprisingly favours navigation over search, with most web revisits occurring through links and the back button rather than search.
Part II: Hierarchical Folders and Their Alternatives
This section explores why folder hierarchies remain the preferred method for PIM despite proposed alternatives. The authors test different technologies against folders and explain why navigation is cognitively preferred.
Chapter 5: The Search Alternative
The authors examine the “search everything” approach, which proposes that advanced search engines should replace hierarchical folder navigation. Despite major improvements in search technology (real-time indexing, incremental search, cross-format search), their studies show users still strongly prefer navigation (56-68% of retrievals) over search (7-15%). The reasons include:
Chapter 6: The Tagging Alternative
This chapter examines tags as an alternative to folders. Tags theoretically offer advantages: allowing multiple classification of items and eliminating hierarchies. While tags work well for social web content, the authors’ studies show that in personal information management:
The authors suggest this preference exists because single classification is cognitively simpler than multiple classification, and most users successfully remember where they stored their files.
Chapter 7: The Group Management Alternative
This chapter explores Group Information Management (GIM), where multiple users share and organize files in common repositories (like Dropbox or Google Drive). While GIM has theoretical advantages, the authors’ research shows:
They identify four reasons PIM outperforms GIM for retrieval: the subjectivity of classification, the benefits of active organization for memory, the importance of episodic memory, and the reduced sense of control in GIM.
This chapter provides cognitive and neurological explanations for the preference for navigation over search. Two studies present convergent evidence:
These findings explain why navigation is preferred: it uses evolutionary older brain regions specialized for spatial navigation, requiring less of the limited verbal working memory resources often needed for other tasks.
Part III: The User-Subjective Approach to PIM Systems Design
This section presents the authors’ design framework for PIM systems based on their empirical findings. They propose three principles that exploit the self-directed nature of PIM.
Chapter 9: The User-Subjective Approach
The authors introduce their approach to PIM design, arguing that since the organizer and retriever are the same person, PIM systems should exploit subjective information attributes. They identify three subjective attributes:
These attributes inform three design principles for PIM systems.
Chapter 10: The Subjective Importance Principle
This principle states that visual salience and accessibility should correspond to an item’s subjective importance. It has two subprinciples:
The authors developed and evaluated three implementations:
All three implementations showed significant improvements in retrieval efficiency and user satisfaction.
Chapter 11: The Subjective Project Classification Principle
This principle addresses the “project fragmentation problem,” where information related to a single project is scattered across different applications and folders. It states that information items from the same project should be grouped together regardless of format or application. The authors propose a “single hierarchy solution” implemented as ProjectFolders, which would allow documents, emails, web favourites, and other items related to a project to be stored and accessed together.
Chapter 12: The Subjective Context Principle
This principle states that information should be retrieved in the same context in which it was previously used. The authors identify four types of context:
They present implemented designs for each context type:
Nuanced Perspectives
The authors acknowledge multiple perspectives throughout their work. They recognize arguments for alternative folder-based navigation and present them fairly before offering counterevidence. They note that while folders have limitations, proposed alternatives (search, tags, GIM) fail to address the fundamental cognitive processes involved in PIM. They also acknowledge that certain technologies may work well in one domain (e.g., tags for Web 2.0) but not in PIM.
The book recognizes individual differences in management strategies, noting that personality traits influence organizational preferences. The authors carefully present their user-subjective design principles abstractly, encouraging multiple possible implementations rather than prescribing specific designs.
In discussing future directions, they maintain openness to emerging technologies that might improve PIM while cautioning against assuming that technologies successful in other domains will transfer effectively to personal information management.
Underlying Assumptions
The book operates from several key assumptions:
The authors’ methodology reflects a commitment to ecological validity, using studies of actual user behaviour with personal information rather than artificial lab tasks whenever possible.
Connections & Implications
The work connects PIM research to broader fields, including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and information science. Emphasizing PIM’s subjective, personalized nature challenges dominant information management paradigms that focus on standardization and objective organization.
The practical implications are significant for designing personal information systems. Rather than attempting to replace folder hierarchies with search or tagging, the authors suggest enhancing folders with features that support subjective attributes. Their design principles could inform the development of future operating systems, email clients, and file management tools.
The book also has implications for teaching information management skills. The authors caution against blanket recommendations for “best practices,” noting that effective strategies depend on individual differences and specific contexts.
The authors acknowledge that emerging technologies like machine learning, cloud storage, and wearable devices will create new challenges and opportunities for PIM. However, they suggest that understanding the fundamental cognitive processes involved in curation will remain essential, regardless of technological advancement.