If you are dealing with huge amounts of information and getting overwhelmed with such task this blog is for you. If you just work with few pieces of data you are lucky or you haven't recognised being in the middle of a great challenge: dealing with the monstrous quantity of information that the personal computer and the Web pour over us. And, maybe you haven't discovered the great opportunity to acquire significant knowledge and not necessarily memorize and classify information in big amounts. Significant knowledge overpasses massive information.

To put it in the simplest possible words: Do you need to emulate or to have a personal Google in your desktop? If yes this is for you, if not, don't bother to read it, you can do something better with your time.

In this time the amount of information at our disposal is not comparable to what we had available before the digital era. To classify that gigantic amount of information is becoming an almost imposible endeavour. Organization is over and deorganization can be the word for the emergent task.

The first thing to do is to suck the data out of our folders, groups or categories and pour it in a big container...  and the new quest is... how to find what we want in the middle of that mess.

To develop methods and strategies for finding informations is the new quest.

Traditional administrative-management paradigms are useless now for management of personal information; mainly the organization paradigms.

Actually most of the times we, a lot of people, are engaging in the task of organizing the enormous information available instead of transforming it in real and useful knowledge. This Knowledge is not more than information that went into human cogitation and was integrated to the other knowledge we already built before.

To say it again: It is not possible to organize that amount of information in the Web or even in our computers, it takes to much time and effort and more important: it's now dumb and purposeless.

The classic paradigm to organize info in our personal computers and to rely on folders, categories or groups is outdated. We are in front of useful trends like going through the contents of every file, searching every word; task now possible due to the processing speed and algoritms developed for such task: to find what we need.

Another trend is tagging the files in order to assign keywords to identify their content. But to avoid redundancy we should not duplicate the words in the content because as we say we can now diligently dig them up at lightening speeds. The tags should ideally be different than the words in the content and be good at synthesizing and being good pointers.

Tag deorganization is so much better than folders, groups or categories in our personal computers. But we insist not to miss the goal: As to classify thousands of books and documents or to tag all of them is useless and almost impossible, the point is how to find what we need in the Web and in our personal computers. Vast amounts of information in books, documents and files that are like needles in a haystack can now be searched due to the lightening speeds that are available now; we can dig trough all of that info. So, the key is to develop searching methods and strategies like the ones that make Google so successful and useful to everybody.

If you know how to manage tags tools, smart folders and spotlight, you can make it, absolutely. This is in the Macintosh environment but there are approximate equivalents in Windows. Unfortunately not as good as the ones in the former.

The next paradigm in PIM is to deorganize going over the old organization paradigms and reorganize the data with a minimum amount of folders, groups and categories. Next we have to find what we need with the minimum amount of effort, time and fuss. To create organized static buildings of not easily accessible info is like to make huge and laberintic buildings without stairs and elevators, just bunches of drawers and cabinets. That doesn't work.

The new deorganization paradigm is a main key to transform information into knowledge and to go jump from Personal Information Management -PIM- to personal Knowledge Management -PKM.

If you can afford PIM software like Devonthink (everything good I can say about it won't be enough - despite it's learning curve, not has hard as some people say) or the Together app that will help you a lot. But even without that amazing software you can change the old, inefficient and so badly ingrained paradigms and methods inherited by the human mind.

The next blog will talk about deorganizing information and developing searching methods, strategies and techniques. We will go further in how to use Tags and when not to use them, at the same time we will discuss how to use smart folders and spotlight.

Key ideas:

• Traditional organizing model is archaic for PIM - Personal Information Management.
• Folders, Categories or Groups have been transcended.
• Tag organization is useful but limited.
• Searching methods and strategies are jumping now in the middle of PIM.
• The need of a new paradigm to organise information is unavoidable.