A wealth of utterly irrelevant information

In some cases, people do operate businesses with less than the optimal amount of the right information at their fingertips.

Making good decisions without this can be tricky, but it's not the most difficult thing to do.

What's far more difficult is the constant filtering and editing out of the vast oversupply of absolutely irrelevant information that inundates our mailboxes, dashboards and team meetings every day.

Time and money wasted on irrelevant information robs us of our capacity to achieve the things that really are important to focus on.

Nonsense information steals time and energy from the people who, at one point in time, were told to capture and document the uselessness in reports and slide decks that nobody really should be paying any attention to anyway.

Those people now see producing this stuff as a part of their job, part of their contribution. The knock-on effects of this addiction to data and an over-reliance on feedback are staggering.

Knowing this, there is good reason to embark on an information diet; a process of purposefully ensuring that the information within your circle of influence, that is produced and consumed is of definable relevance...and chucking out the rest.

Know how information is being used, see how it is not being used, how much it costs to capture and determine how good the decision-making as a result of its selection actually is.

It's easy to be sucked into the hype of the big data-age, but don't let the excitement lure you into the illusion of knowing something random that bears no relevance to what you are trying to achieve.