In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how people use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our participants were faculty, staff and students who were not required to use or contribute to any specific calendaring solution, but chose to do so anyway. The study was conducted in three parts: first, an initial survey provided broad insights into how calendars were used; second, this was followed up with personal interviews of a few participants which were transcribed and content-analyzed; and third, examples of calendar artifacts were collected to inform our analysis. Findings from our study include the use of multiple reminder alarms, the reliance on paper calendars even among regular users of electronic calendars, and wide use of calendars for reporting and life-archival purposes. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what these imply for designers of interactive calendar systems and future work in PIM research.
Jones @cite_33 framed the problems in PIM in terms of the canonical tasks of , , and . Keeping any kind of information involves a tradeoff between the likelihood it will be recalled in the future, and the costs of capturing and retaining it. Organizing involves filing it away such that it can be retrieved easily in the future, and while keeping the cost of organizing less than the cost of finding. Re-finding is a different problem from finding, since there are aspects to encountered information that make it personal.
@cite_33
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To keep or not to keep? People continually face variations of this decision as they encounter information. A large percentage of information encountered is clearly useless  junk email, for example. Another portion of encountered information can be "used up" and disposed of in a single read  the weather report or a sports score, for example. That leaves a great deal of information in a middle ground. The information might be useful somewhere at sometime in the future. Decisions concerning whether and how to keep this information are an essential part of personal information management. Bad decisions either way can be costly. Information not kept or not kept properly may be unavailable later when it is needed. But keeping too much information can also be costly. The wrong information competes for attention and may obscure information more appropriate to the current task. These are the logical costs of a signal detection task. From this perspective, one approach in tool support is to try to decrease the costs of a false positive (keeping useless information) and a miss (not keeping useful information). But this reduction in the costs of keeping mistakes is likely to be bounded by fundamental limitations in the human ability to remember and to attend. A second approach suggested by the theory of signal detectability is relatively less explored: Develop tools that decrease the likelihood that "keeping" mistakes are made in the first place.