How helpful is it to organize personal information by activity?

Knowledge workers are known to adopt a range of different schemes to organise personal information resources such as email, documents, and spreadsheets. Some researchers have argued that grouping resources by the activity that they support should assist filing and retrieval. To investigate this claim, we systematically compared an activity-based scheme to two contrasting approaches: grouping by topic and grouping by time-management attributes. We also included an unconstrained free-form condition. We selected a controlled method to complement the existing naturalistic work on this topic. A cohort of 74 participants, with similar educational and occupational backgrounds, worked in small groups to design schemes for a given scenario with realistic and relatable goals, responsibilities, and interests. Each group was randomly assigned to one of the four conditions. A statistical analysis of their reported experiences showed that while they reported that all four schemes had some benefits, they had greater confidence in organizing by activity over the other constrained approaches. While organizing by activity was not preferred to an unconstrained approach, an exploratory review of these free-form designs showed that most participants spontaneously organised by activity at higher levels of a hierarchy with some use of other concepts, such as genre, at lower levels.