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Nobody's Perfect: My Personal PIM Debt

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I do write a lot about PIM topics, I did some PIM research about local file management, I love to give lectures on PIM topics. Therefore, it's quite natural that people start to believe that my personal PIM situation is near perfect.

As I once wrote on Mastodon, this is not the case at all:

A screenshot of a Mastodon message that reads
My Mastodon post about spring-cleaning my Org-mode inbox file.

I got great feedback from people writing that they are relieved that even "somebody like me" is really struggling with processing all the information as properly as desired.

Therefore, I want to update this persistent article from time to time, showing my current status of some digital debt in terms of unprocessed items in various inboxes of mine. 

NOW_IN_ORG_TIMESTAMP="<`date '+%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M'`>"
zero=" → should be 0"
echo "- Snapshot from ${NOW_IN_ORG_TIMESTAMP} on host \"${HOSTNAME}\""
mailnumwithdirs=$(find ~/Maildir/new/ ~/Maildir/cur/ ~/Maildir/tmp/ | wc -l)
mailnum=$(( mailnumwithdirs - 3 ))
echo "  - ${mailnum} emails in my personal inbox ${zero}"
numorginbox=$(grep '^\* ' ~/org/inbox.org | wc -l)
echo "  - ${numorginbox} captured and unprocessed Org-mode headings ${zero}"
photos=$(find ~/tmp/digicam/ -name '*.jpg' | wc -l)
echo "  - ${photos} digital photographs not described, tagged and archived ${zero}"
numtempfiles=$(find ~/tmp/2del | wc -l)
echo "  - ${numtempfiles} temporary files downloaded, not archived or deleted yet - on only one of my machines"
orgnew=$( egrep "\* (NEXT|TODO)" ~/org/*org ~/org/*org_archive | wc -l )
orgstarted=$( egrep "\* STARTED" ~/org/*org ~/org/*org_archive | wc -l )
orgwaiting=$( egrep "\* WAITING" ~/org/*org ~/org/*org_archive | wc -l )
orgfinished=$( egrep "\* (DONE|CANCELLED)" ~/org/*org ~/org/*org_archive | wc -l )
echo "  - My current number of Org-mode tasks:"; echo "    - ${orgnew} yet to be started → backlog"
echo "    - ${orgstarted} ongoing"; echo "    - ${orgwaiting} waiting for something or somebody"
echo "    - ${orgfinished} finished"

I might get down to zero emails quite easily within half an hour or so. Unfortunately, I'm not as diligent as I should be. I still think that inbox zero is the way to go. Lucky me, I don't get that many emails a day so it's still not a huge issue.

The high number of captured and unprocessed Org-mode inbox headings is really an issue to me. I really need to get this down to zero some day as there are cool ideas, URLs to visit and projects to do hidden in this big pile.

Although I created probably the most amazing and quickest way to manage digital photographs, I probably spent more time writing tools and polishing the workflow than actually processing my photographs. Yes, you might have a hard laugh at this moment, I'll join in myself. ;-) I have no idea, how I should be able to get down to zero here as there are thousands of photographs starting from 2006 or so in this pile. This is really giving me a hard time when I think about it. As my new year's resolution 2022, I tried to archive a couple of hundred images each month to get down but I failed in doing so.

My temporary files folder doesn't need to be empty. However, the more stuff it accumulates, the less likely I might be able to decide to delete stuff in there. Although I named this directory "2del" (short for "to delete") on purpose, there is this thought in my brain that still thinks that "maybe there are some important gems I forgot to file properly". I guess that's natural. Therefore, I do think that I should go through the files and reduce the number here as well.

The number of Org-mode tasks in different states reflect the amount of running and planned PIM projects. One of them is the idea to write a PIM book with the content of my PIM lecture that should be tool-independent and last decades without getting outdated. I started to think about this project around 2012.

So now you know that I'm at least as inconsequent as everybody else. At least I do think that I know quite well how the process actually should work and I've created handy tools to support me. Don't get me wrong: Some of my workflows are working really, really well so that I don't have any debt there.

After all, PIM is just a life-long journey like everything else.

2024-11-27: Comment by Ihor Radchenko (yantar92)

Ihor commented related my sentence from above:

have no idea, how I should be able to get down to zero here as there are thousands of photographs starting from 2006 or so in this pile.

Here is, what Ihor wrote:

I had the same problem until I simplified my requirements to the inbox, photographs, and Downloads processing.
I once realized that life can go wild and my inbox may indeed accumulate things. So many that I'd need to spent days to catch up. Moreover, things I was once interested in (and still may in future) are not something I really need to spend a lot of effort now. Priority should be given to the ideas related to what I am thinking about actively or better working on actively.
For me, processing photographs/Downloads is not about properly tagging them, but simply either (a) deleting immediately; (b) creating an inbox item. Then, all that's left is processing the inbox.
For inbox, rather than spending a few in-depth minutes thinking on each item, I first decide whether this inbox item should be immediately deleted, immediately scheduled, or refiled to a specific project/area. Then, the projects/areas I do not currently have time for will never show up in my agenda/review until I explicitly decide that it is the time to come back to that project/area. For active projects/areas, I do review the items more in-depth after refiling them. This way, I can control the time spent doing PIM organization tasks - if it is getting overboard, it simply means that I have to disable some project/area temporarily as I have not enough time for them.
The above works quite well in terms of managing the amount of incoming information to process. Except when life intervenes with the regular workflow and things gets blown out of control still.
To handle the piles of backlogs to process (even quickly), I adopted several very simple workflows:
1. For inbox process (which is just delete/schedule/refile), it is practically fast enough to process everything
2. For secondary review of tasks within active projects/areas I use time blocking - I limit my secondary review to no more than 30 minutes per day (via effort estimate and org-clock-sound)
3. For the piles of Downloads/photos/obsolete categorization system I simply have repeating tasks like "Copy one file from Downloads to Org" or "Refile one heading from obsolete todo.org". They take literally seconds (or more, when I have a mood), but when repeated daily can get things progressed surprisingly far - I have managed to sort out my old todo.org with more than 1000 items within a year; I have my Downloads folder almost empty (fluctuating depending on how many things I add at once); I have managed to sort my photos all the way from back in 2009 to 2020 with several more years to be yet processed.

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