---
title: "Information management"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/information-management
published: 2010-07-06
summary: "An article by the head of Microsoft Ukraine got me thinking: if time management is about handling floods of information, it needs a companion discipline. Here is my attempt to define it."
---

# Information management

An article by the general manager of Microsoft Ukraine, "[Personal effectiveness in the age of information overload](http://www.investgazeta.net/blogi/lichnaja-effektivnost-v-epohu-peregruzki-159257/)", which ran in the previous issue (No. 25) of *Investgazeta*, a Ukrainian business weekly, set me thinking.

If we take time management to be a tool for organizing work effectively, work that is most often tied up with large flows of information, then we can widen the idea and add techniques of information management to it.

I may be making some methodological mistakes here, but I hope not too stupid ones :) [Wikipedia has a different view of what information management means.](http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B6%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82)

So, **information management** is a set of techniques for managing personal and corporate information flows in order to extract the most useful data from them, organize and store it, limit the "information noise", and organize the work process effectively.

The tasks of information management (**info-management**):

1. Extracting the information you need from many sources;
2. Arranging these sources so they don't intrude (managing incoming messages so that they arrive at the right time and don't distract from the work at hand, but don't get forgotten or lost either);
3. Organizing and presenting information in a form that is convenient to store, process, search and work on together;
4. Cutting down the number of unnecessary (distracting) messages;
5. Getting the information employees need to them (including tasks and the data needed to carry them out);
6. Organizing the flow of documents in the company;
7. Organizing a personal or corporate knowledge base (this is already something close to knowledge management).

The result of successful information management is **better concentration** at work, and so higher productivity.

I think it's precisely the inability to concentrate, when messages and news come in from all sides (email, messengers, calls, Twitter and social networks), that will be (and already is) a big problem for employees, and so for their managers.

To sum up: **techniques for managing your personal information flow are a promising subject** :)