Review your information sources quarterly

Your information environment is rotting. You just cannot smell it yet.

Every subscription in your inbox was a good decision once. Every podcast in your feed solved a problem at the time you added it. Every RSS feed, Slack community, and YouTube channel you follow passed some threshold of relevance on the day you clicked subscribe.

But relevance has a half-life. Your goals shift. Your projects change. The source itself changes. And without a deliberate process to review what you consume, your information environment accumulates dead weight silently — subscriptions that made sense six months ago and now produce nothing but noise you have learned to ignore.

This is not a minor inefficiency. It is a systemic failure of information hygiene. The previous lessons in Phase 7 taught you to distinguish signal from noise, to curate your information diet, and to resist the urgency trap. This lesson addresses a problem those skills cannot solve on their own: even a well-curated information environment degrades over time. Sources decay. Your needs evolve. The only defense is scheduled, recurring review.

The practice is simple. The discipline of doing it every 90 days is what separates people who maintain a clean information environment from people who perform a single dramatic cleanup and then watch the clutter return.

Why quarterly: the cadence that matches reality

The choice of quarterly review is not arbitrary. It maps to two natural cycles that govern the relevance of information sources.

The first cycle is goal evolution. In knowledge work, the shelf life of a specific focus area is roughly 90 days. Projects launch and complete. Strategic priorities shift. Skills you were building reach a plateau and new learning goals emerge. A quarterly cadence catches the moment when information sources that supported your last quarter's focus have become noise for your current quarter's work.

James Clear recognized this pattern in the context of habit review. In Atomic Habits (2018), he argues that habits — including information consumption habits — can become mindless and limiting without periodic reassessment. His Annual Review asks three questions: "What went well? What didn't go well? What did I learn?" But Clear himself notes that annual review is a minimum frequency. The insight is that behaviors you adopted for good reasons can persist long past their usefulness. Information subscriptions are habits. They auto-renew. They require active cancellation to stop. Without review, they accumulate like barnacles on a ship — individually small, collectively enough to slow you down.

Clear publishes an Integrity Report alongside his Annual Review, forcing himself to revisit whether his actions still align with his stated values. Applied to information: does each source still align with your stated epistemic goals? The question only works if you ask it on a schedule.

The second cycle is source degradation. Platforms and publications change over time — often in ways that reduce quality for the original audience. Cory Doctorow formalized this dynamic in 2022 with the concept he named enshittification: a three-stage process in which platforms begin by being good to their users, then degrade the user experience to serve business customers, and finally extract maximum value from both users and business customers for shareholders. The American Dialect Society selected enshittification as its 2023 Word of the Year, and Australia's Macquarie Dictionary followed suit for 2024. The concept has resonance because people recognize the pattern from direct experience.

Enshittification describes platform-level decay, but individual sources degrade too. A newsletter writer gets acquired by a media company and the editorial voice shifts toward engagement optimization. A blog you followed for its technical depth pivots to SEO-driven listicles. A podcast host leaves and the replacement does not share the original's analytical rigor. A subreddit that was once a curated community grows past its moderation capacity and fills with low-effort posts. These degradation events do not announce themselves. The quality erosion happens gradually — a slightly less useful issue here, a clickbait headline there — and your threshold adjusts alongside it. You accommodate the declining quality without noticing, the same way you stop smelling something after you have been in the room long enough.

A quarterly review catches what gradual exposure conceals. When you evaluate a source you have been reading for 90 days against your current goals and standards, the gap between what it delivers and what you need becomes visible.

The information audit: from organizational discipline to personal practice

The concept of a formal information audit originates in organizational information management. Susan Henczel's seven-stage model, published in The Information Audit: A Practical Guide (2001), provides a structured methodology for organizations to inventory their information resources, map how information flows through the organization, identify gaps and redundancies, and align information resources with strategic objectives. Buchanan and Gibb (2008) later confirmed that Henczel's methodology, alongside Orna's (1999), represented the most comprehensive approach to information auditing available in the field.

The organizational information audit answers a question most companies never ask: are the information resources we pay for and consume actually serving our strategic goals? The answer is usually no — not because the resources are poor, but because information needs change faster than information subscriptions.

The personal information audit applies the same logic to your individual information environment. You are not auditing a company's database subscriptions and knowledge management systems. You are auditing your newsletters, feeds, podcasts, social media follows, community memberships, and notification sources. But the core question is identical: does this resource still serve my current goals?

Chun Wei Choo's research on environmental scanning reinforces why this matters. In "The Art of Scanning the Environment" (1999), Choo demonstrated that effective information acquisition requires deliberate alignment between information sources and strategic objectives. Organizations that scan their environment systematically — choosing sources that match their strategic needs rather than passively accumulating whatever arrives — make better decisions. The principle translates directly: your personal information environment is the landscape you scan for signal. If the sources in that landscape are misaligned with your current objectives, you are scanning the wrong terrain.

The subscription fatigue epidemic

The scale of the problem is documented. A 2026 Readless study found that more than half of consumers feel overwhelmed by the number of subscriptions they manage, and nearly a third have cancelled at least one subscription in the past year. The average knowledge worker receives 117 emails per day. Globally, 376 billion emails were sent daily in 2025. Newsletter unsubscribe rates average 0.17% across industries — meaning that for every thousand people who receive a newsletter, fewer than two unsubscribe per issue. The default behavior is to keep receiving content you no longer read, because the cost of each individual email is imperceptible and the act of unsubscribing requires a decision.

This is subscription inertia, and it operates identically to the status quo bias documented in behavioral economics. Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) demonstrated that people disproportionately prefer the current state of affairs, even when alternatives are objectively superior. Applied to information subscriptions: you keep sources not because you evaluated them and decided they should stay, but because you never decided they should go. The subscription persists by default. The noise accumulates by default. And your information environment degrades by default — not through any single bad decision, but through the absence of recurring good ones.

The quarterly information audit is the intervention that breaks this default. It forces a re-evaluation that subscription inertia prevents from happening naturally.

The three-question audit framework

Complex audit methodologies work for organizations with dedicated information management staff. For a personal quarterly review, you need something you can execute in 30 minutes. Three questions are sufficient.

Question 1: When did I last act on something from this source?

This is the signal test. Action means: changed a decision, started a project, updated a belief, adjusted a behavior, shared the insight with someone who found it useful. If you cannot recall a specific instance in the last 90 days, the source is not producing signal for you — regardless of its objective quality.

The distinction matters. A source can be excellent and still be noise for you. The New England Journal of Medicine is among the most respected publications in the world. If you are not in medicine, it is noise. Quality without relevance is still noise.

Question 2: If I discovered this source today, would I subscribe?

This is the freshness test. It eliminates the sunk cost bias that keeps you subscribed to sources you would never choose now. Your past self made the subscription decision under different circumstances — different goals, different projects, different information needs. The question asks whether your current self, with current needs, would make the same choice.

Cal Newport's digital declutter process in Digital Minimalism (2019) uses a version of this logic. His 30-day experiment asks participants to remove optional technologies entirely, then selectively reintroduce only those that support something they deeply value. Newport tested this with 1,600 volunteers. He estimates that 50% who completed the declutter left social media permanently, and 98% removed social media from their phones and kept it off. The insight is that reintroduction is far more selective than continuation — you add back far fewer things than you would have kept through inertia.

The quarterly audit applies this principle without requiring a 30-day abstinence period. You do not remove everything and start over. You evaluate each source against the standard of "would I choose this today?" and remove the ones that fail.

Question 3: What is the signal-to-noise ratio of this source's recent output?

This is the degradation test. It catches sources that were excellent when you subscribed but have declined in quality since. Scan the last 10-15 items from the source. What percentage directly relates to your current goals? If the ratio is below 20% — fewer than 1 in 5 items produces something you can use — the source has either degraded or your needs have shifted past it. Either way, it no longer justifies the attention it consumes.

This question is particularly important for catching enshittification in progress. The newsletter that started with original research and now mostly promotes sponsored content. The YouTube channel that shifted from deep analysis to reaction videos. The podcast that used to feature practitioners and now books influencers. The degradation is gradual enough that regular consumers adapt to it. The quarterly audit makes it visible by forcing a ratio assessment.

The retrospective model: what software teams already know

Agile software teams have solved this exact problem — for processes, not information sources. The sprint retrospective is a recurring ceremony, typically every two weeks, where the team asks: What went well? What did not go well? What should we change? The retrospective works not because any individual session produces a breakthrough, but because the recurrence creates a feedback loop. Small problems get caught before they compound. Practices that have stopped serving the team get identified and retired. New practices get adopted in response to changing conditions.

The personal information audit is a retrospective for your information environment. The same three structural elements apply:

1. Scheduled recurrence. Retrospectives are not triggered by crises. They happen on a calendar. Your information audit happens quarterly regardless of whether you feel your sources need review. Feeling like things are fine is exactly the state in which degradation goes unnoticed.

2. Structured evaluation. Retrospectives use frameworks — Start/Stop/Continue, the Three Ls (Liked/Learned/Lacked), Mad/Sad/Glad — to prevent the session from becoming unfocused complaining. The three-question audit framework provides the same structure: signal test, freshness test, degradation test.

3. Action items. A retrospective that produces observations but no changes is theater. An information audit that identifies noise sources but does not unsubscribe from them is identical theater. Every audit must produce a concrete cut list — sources you remove that day, not sources you "might reconsider later."

AI as your audit accelerant

The quarterly information audit is a manual process by design — you need to evaluate relevance against your own goals, and no AI can do that for you. But AI can dramatically accelerate the data-gathering phase.

Pattern analysis. Feed your email client's subscription list into an LLM and ask: "Which of these newsletters have I opened fewer than 3 times in the last 90 days?" Most email platforms track open rates. AI can parse this data and surface the sources you are paying attention costs for but not actually reading. The sources you do not open are the easiest cuts — they are noise you have already voted against with your behavior.

Content quality assessment. Paste the last five issues of a newsletter into an LLM and ask: "What percentage of this content is original analysis versus aggregated links, promotional content, or filler?" This surfaces the degradation pattern that is hardest to see from the inside. You may discover that a source you consider high-quality has shifted to 70% promotional content over the last quarter without you consciously registering the change.

Consumption pattern mapping. If you use a read-it-later service like Readwise Reader, Pocket, or Instapaper, export your reading history and ask an AI to categorize it by source, topic, and completion rate. The sources with the lowest completion rates are producing content you save but never finish — a behavioral signal that the source is not delivering enough value to hold your attention through an entire piece.

Source scorecard generation. Ask an AI to create a structured scorecard for your top 20 information sources, with columns for: last action taken, current relevance (1-5), signal-to-noise estimate, and renewal recommendation (keep/cut/probation). You populate the ratings. The AI generates the structure. The output becomes a persistent document you update each quarter, creating a longitudinal record of how your information environment evolves.

The principle, consistent with every AI application in this curriculum: AI handles the mechanical work — parsing, categorizing, structuring — so your limited cognitive resources focus on the judgment work that only you can do.

The protocol: your first quarterly information audit

This protocol takes 30-45 minutes. Schedule it now. Do not wait for the "right time" — the right time is the moment you recognize your information environment has not been reviewed.

Step 1 — Inventory (10 minutes). List every recurring information source. Include: email newsletters, RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube subscriptions, Slack and Discord communities, subreddits, social media accounts you actively follow, news apps, push notification sources, group chats with informational content. Do not filter as you list. Capture everything. Most people discover they have 40-80 recurring sources. Some have over 150.

Step 2 — Score (15 minutes). For each source, answer the three audit questions. You do not need detailed analysis — gut responses are sufficient for most sources. The ones that require deliberation are the borderline cases, and those deserve the extra thought. Mark each source: Keep, Cut, or Probation (review again next quarter with the expectation of cutting if nothing changes).

Step 3 — Cut (5 minutes). Execute every cut immediately. Unsubscribe, unfollow, mute, leave. Do not batch the cuts for later. Do not put them on a to-do list. The act of cutting is the audit's output. An audit that produces a list of sources you "should" unsubscribe from but does not actually unsubscribe is not an audit. It is a wish.

Step 4 — Schedule (1 minute). Create a recurring calendar event for 90 days from today. Title it "Information Source Audit — Q[X] [Year]." In the description, paste the three audit questions. Your future self needs the prompt.

Step 5 — Log (5 minutes). Record what you cut and why. This log serves two purposes. First, it prevents re-subscription — when you encounter the source again and think "maybe I should follow this," the log reminds you why you stopped. Second, over multiple quarters, the log reveals patterns in your information needs. You will see which domains you consistently add and cut sources from, which topics have stable information needs, and which sources have the longest retention across audits. This is metadata about your own epistemic evolution.

The compound effect of quarterly maintenance

One audit is a cleanup. Four audits is a system. Sixteen audits is a practice that has fundamentally changed how you relate to information.

The compound effect works like this: each quarterly audit removes 5-15 sources that are no longer producing signal. Over a year, you have eliminated 20-60 sources of noise. Over three years, you have cut 60-180. But you have also added new sources — ones aligned with your evolving goals. The net effect is an information environment that tracks your actual needs rather than your historical subscriptions.

This is what Choo's environmental scanning research predicts: when your information sources are deliberately aligned with your objectives, the quality of your decisions improves. Not because you consume more, but because what you consume is relevant. The quarterly audit is the mechanism that maintains that alignment as your objectives change.

The previous lesson, When in doubt, wait, taught you that most information that feels urgent becomes irrelevant within 48 hours. This lesson extends the principle across a longer timeframe: most information sources that feel essential become irrelevant within a few quarters. The discipline is the same — patience with uncertainty, willingness to consume less, trust that what matters will surface through the sources that survive your audit.

The next lesson, Signal detection is a survival skill, elevates this practice from information hygiene to competitive advantage. In an environment where everyone is drowning in noise, the person who maintains a clean, current, deliberately curated information environment does not just think more clearly. They see opportunities, threats, and patterns that are invisible to people whose signal detectors are buried under subscriptions they forgot they had.

Your information sources are infrastructure. Infrastructure requires maintenance. Schedule the maintenance, or watch the infrastructure rot.

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Sources

1. Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Avery. Chapter 20: "The Downside of Creating Good Habits."
2. Doctorow, C. (2023). "The Enshittification of TikTok." Pluralistic. Originally coined in November 2022; selected as American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year.
3. Henczel, S. (2001). The Information Audit: A Practical Guide. K.G. Saur. Seven-stage information audit methodology.
4. Choo, C.W. (1999). "The Art of Scanning the Environment." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 25(3), 21-24.
5. Newport, C. (2019). Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Portfolio/Penguin. Digital declutter experiment with 1,600 volunteers.
6. Buchanan, S. & Gibb, F. (2008). "The Information Audit: Methodology Selection." International Journal of Information Management, 28(1), 3-11.
7. Samuelson, W. & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). "Status Quo Bias in Decision Making." Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), 7-59.
8. Readless (2026). "Subscription Fatigue Statistics." Survey data on subscription overwhelm and cancellation behavior.
9. Amra & Elma (2025). "Email Unsubscribe Rate Statistics." Industry analysis of email engagement metrics.