Homework! I have homework for my knowledge management class, and I thought the questions were interesting enough to share with you. Unless my instructor objects, I’ll post assignments here. Please add your two cents because I’m always interested in how other people manage.

What does your personal knowledge space look like? How do you organize e-mail, contacts, files, internet bookmarks and paper filing? Do you organize it all? Do you have a goal from which you frequently stray? What should be better?

E-mail
I divide e-mail into three accounts: work, personal and junk. For work, I keep actionable items in my inbox and archive everything else immediately. If I need something, which is rare, I retrieve it through full text search. I keep all work e-mail because experience has taught me that it’s better to save it than not.

I don’t keep any personal e-mail archives, except for the first and only e-mail that my dad sent me. Awwwww. Anyway, this is where all e-mail from my friends, family and school (I have a Northwestern account, but it’s forwarded to Gmail) is sent. I only keep actionable items in my inbox and delete the rest. I keep all my personal e-mail addresses in this account.

My junk account is for on-line shopping transactions, newsletters or services that I may want to try and, ahem, on-line dating responses. Again, I keep interesting or actionable items in my inbox and delete the rest.

Contacts
Work addresses and phone numbers are maintained by my organization. I have a few vendor e-mails stuffed into a work address book, but I don’t keep much else since I work almost exclusively with people within my organization.

Personal e-mail addresses are kept in my Gmail account. Cell phone numbers are stored in my cell phone. Yes, I’m in trouble if Gmail goes down or my cell phone gets swiped. However, I think it makes sense to maintain this information where it’ll be used.

Files
I have a very good memory and most of my information sources are on-line, so until recently, I hadn’t felt the need to keep electronic copies of articles. School changed that. I now have a directory for each class that I’ve taken. I keep handouts, presentations and papers from each class. I generally rename files so that they make sense when I go back to review them, but otherwise don’t put any structure or meta information around the content.

I manage music files in iTunes, and have my own rules for artist names and genres. Photos are renamed by subject and put into dated directories. I do share photos on-line in flickr, but the pictures are tagged with my screen name for retrieval. I don’t use any serious meta data for my on-line photos.

Bookmarks
Sites or articles that don’t have RSS feeds are shuffled into Furl, a browser-based bookmarking tool. I have general categories set-up which I try to mirror in Bloglines so I have some continuity between the information sources I manage.

Paper
I only keep the bare minimum: contracts, performance reviews, tax returns (though my most current ones are in PDF), and recent bills. Most of my finances — bills, statements, transactions — are handled on-line. I am a power shredder.

However, I do have all the paper handouts from school. These piles of paper drive me crazy because I don’t know where to put them or have the energy to organize them.

Blogs
I maintain two blogs, one for friends and a topic based blog on content aggregation and related issues. I write about things that I’m examining and want to revisit at a later time. I really benefit from having interaction with the rest of the web. The public presentation of ideas prods me to think about what I’m writing in a deeper, more meaningful way. I’ve met some interesting people through blogs, and had some fascinating conversations because I’ve my on-line presence. To me, this is where real knowledge happens — through interaction with people.

RSS Feeds
This is where I do most of my work. All of the sites that I value from friends, news outlets, blogs, etc. are active in my Bloglines subscriptions. I save articles that I want to read later, clip articles that I want to keep, and e-mail articles that I want to share. I also track specific keywords through technorati, keep on top of the weather, the latest movie releases from Netflix, and my blogosphere status. My collection of feeds is fluid, but the number and composition changes to meet my current needs.

Do I organize it all?
Yes, I do. Some of pieces are better organized than others.

Do I have a goal from which I frequently stray?
I don’t immediately categorize bookmarks. I let them pile up and clean them up in batches. I’m starting to have the same issue with feeds.

What should be better?
Personal knowledge management tools! I would like a personal controlled vocabulary tool that would allow me to apply meta data to both desktop and web-based content. While I’m dreaming, I would also like to subscribe to feeds for this personal meta data, and be able to subdivide and reorganize this meta data globally. Also, a search engine that integrates both of these desktop and personal on-line sources without throwing adwords at me or stealing/abusing my database of intentions.

Also, I would like to see the integration of all this disparate resources that I use. Gmail, Bloglines, Furl, Netflix, etc. should be one application…maybe it will all be cobbled together via RSS one of these days.

I would love to get ride of the last little bit of paper in my life.

I tend to wait and organize information in batches. When my “under evaluation” folder in Bloglines or Furl starts showing trends, then I group that information into a new category. This has led to a mix of genre and topic based categories. They make sense to me, but I’m dissatisfied with my efforts to construct a controlled vocabulary that meet my long-time information storage needs, my short-term attention span, and my desire to share information with others.

Finally, I need to become even more ruthless about deleting non-productive feeds. It’s hard to be disciplined about it.