Dealing with Information Overload

This data was originally featured on the October 1st, 2025 newsletter found here:INBOX INSIGHTS, October 1, 2025: AI Data Quality, Dealing With Information Overload

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about dealing with content overwhelm. With the advent of generative AI, more people and more companies are publishing more content than ever before.

How do we decide what content to consume? How do we keep up?

I’ll share the methodology that works for me. Your mileage may vary. Long ago, Google had a set of three measures by which they judged and routed search queries – QDR, QDD, and QDF. These obscure acronyms stood for query deserves relevance, query deserves diversity, and query deserves freshness.

Google used this tripartite algorithm to judge what results to return back in the day, more than a decade ago. It was supplanted by EAT (expertise, authority, and trust) and then by AI not too long after. But this old rubric can serve us well even today, sort of a mini search algorithm in our brains.

Given any piece of content that someone wants us to pay attention to, is it:

• Relevant? If it doesn’t help us move the ball down the field, then no matter how good it is, it should be lower priority.
• Diverse? In Google’s algorithm, diversity referred specifically to format. If the content isn’t available in our preferred format – text, image, audio, video, interactive – then it should be lower priority.
• Fresh? Stale data is like stale coffee beans. If you have nothing else, it will get you by, but fresh is definitely better. Stale content should be lower priority and really stale content should just get composted.

This first pass can winnow down the tsunami of content into a river. But if you’re trying to drink a river, it still might be a frustrating and overwhelming experience.

That’s where AI comes in. You can tackle this in simple ways, like taking all your favorite data sources and putting them into a service like NotebookLM so you can ask super relevant, hyper specific questions of your sources that precisely answer your most burning questions.

You could use Deep Research tools with a prompt like this to programmatically collect the data you want and assemble a briefing daily, weekly, or whenever you want it:

Put together a news briefing for me of the latest news in (topic). The only allowed sources are (your list of trusted sources). No other sources are permitted. The timeframe is content published for the first time after (date). Do not use republished content from before that date. Do not use content published before that date. Rank order the content from most relevant to me to least relevant to me by (your criteria and needs). Return a minimum of 10 results and a maximum of 50 results. Present your results in Markdown format following this outline:

Article Title

• Summary: (1 sentence summary of the article’s most useful insight)
• Publication Date: (yyyy-mm-dd format)
• Relevance Explanation: (1 sentence explanation of why the article is relevant to me)
• Relevance Score: (integer 0-10, where 10 is most relevant to my needs)
• Source: (full article URL)

You could even go so far as to building your own AI agent with AI that programmatically reads and scores all the content in your inboxes and highlights which you should pay attention to first. That’s what we did with our automated weekly AI newsletter, which uses basically the same prompt as above but programmatically, processing thousands of articles a week.

Keeping up with change can be hard, but using today’s tools and technologies can make it more manageable. The bottom line is that you have no shortage of tools and capabilities that can distill the flood of news on any topic down to what you need, in the way that works best for you.

Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.