Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Advantages Of A Good Personal Information Management System

By Andy Zhang


The introduction of the desktop computer a number of years ago pushed the whole idea of personal information management into the space age. Suddenly it became extremely easy to file, manage and retrieve your private information. With the hectic lives we all lead nowadays, a personal information manager has become a vital part of our lives.

A good information manager (also referred to as a PIM) will of course have a diary facility. Here the ease with which you can enter and retrieve appointments and events is of the utmost importance. Scrolling through the months of the year should be quick and easy. It should also offer daily, weekly, monthly and yearly views.

Another important feature of every good PIM is the reminder facility. Once an event/appointment has been entered into the system, it should in some way or other be able to remind you of this before it actually occurs. Some PIMs have built-in email support, so it will remind you by sending an email before the time. Others use pop-up windows or alarms to remind you of an impending event/appointment.

A facility to import or export a calendar from or to another calendar system is also very nice. That means you can import an existing calendar from another software program if you decide to switch to a new one. When you find something better one day, you can also export data to a new program again.

A task manager is another feature every good PIM should have. Sometimes there are a number of things you must do over the next couple of days, but not one of them is linked to a particular day. In this case you can simply enter the task as pending in the task manager and delete it once you have completed it.

A final feature which all decent PIM software packages should include is the ability to manage recurring events or tasks. We all have things that happen on a regular basis: birthdays, meetings and tasks. A recurring event facility will enable you to enter the task/event only once and the system will in future remind you every time before it actually happens.




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