• Search engines: Most effective in searching for public, unstructured data (requires sufficient data to be effective; cannot provide organizational information).

• Folders: Most effective in organizing tree-like personal structured data (Structured data makes up only 10-20% of your total data; the remaining 80-90% is unstructured).

• INFOMATO iMind: Most effective in building reminders for personal unstructured data and in seeing this data self-organized. For instance, how do you remember your customers' favorite restaurants, the hotel in Tokyo, Japan that came highly recommended by a friend, etc?

My suggestions are as follows:

1. Files: Save all of your files into a very "simple folder" structure (for example, chronological folders). You can quickly find your most recent documents for followup. Forget about building detailed logic into your folders because greater than 80% of your information does not fit into a top-down hierarchy. Otherwise, you are building the maze that will eventually be your downfall.

2. Create INFOMATO reminders right away when your motive of saving a file is still clear. Drag and drop (or copy and paste) the file from the simple folder into the reminder. The file pointer (not a copy) is saved in INFOMATO. On average you probably have 10 things worth remembering per day(~3000 per year). When you are familiar with INFOMATO, it will take ~1 minute per reminder, and therefore ~10 minutes per dUse INFOMATO iMind for files that have long-term value, that require followup, or that has complex interrelationships with other documents (emails, files, web, notes, etc.). Use specific and brief terms. For instance, a reminder consisting of "Customer A," "Product B" and "Issue C" is sufficient to prompt you unconscious memory to recall why you saved a particular file. INFOMATO iMind will take care of the organization from here.

3. Do the same (steps 1 and 2) for emails and web browsing.

The search engine is the greatest invention after the Internet. INFOMATO iMind and search engines are complementary to each other. iMind is for searching your motives while search engine is for searching your documents.

1. INFOMATO iMind is for organizing and searching your motives. When you find your motives, you find your files. On the other hand, iMind cannot help you find files that are not linked to your motives.

2. Search engines are great for searching documents when the relevance can be weighted with sufficient data. For highly personal documents, however, there is not enough statistical data for each document to do this effectively; in this case, you need to remember motives to search effectively. If you do not remember what you need or the complex reasoning that is related to it, recalling the information will create a challenging test for your memory.

3. When trying to recall motivation or reasoning, INFOMATO iMind will be your sounding board, cueing you with a list of relevant reminders from which to choose or brain storm. Alternatively, if you are relying on a search engine for this task, you are being quizzed for the answer to an open question (versus selecting the best answer on a questionnaire provided by iMind).

4. Tagging is another means of searching; it lets you "tell" the search engine which important keywords are related to a specific file. Most of the above pros and cons of search engines are also applicable to tagging.