We are awash in data – round the clock news, social media, E-Mails, texts… The challenge for the business leader remains the same:

“The important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise.”  The Economist

So, how can we manage all this data noise and be able to make effective and informed decisions?

Reduce Data Intake: We need to reduce the time we spend on watching or reading news, social media, articles, etc.  Specifically, we need to spend less time on the latest news and breaking news.  A good question to ask:

Will what I am reading now be important and relevant tomorrow?

Poor quality and useless information fills our minds and corrupts our thoughts even if we recognize and dismiss it as junk news.

Instead, we need to focus on reading the few viable sources of good quality news and information.  The Economist is one such source of information largely because it is a weekly publication and thus is not competing with the breaking news outlets. 

Store Less Information: One of the challenges for business leaders is finding the useful pieces of information among all the data that has been stored.  This is especially relevant today as more and more data are being collected to be used in data analytics and as sources for AI (artificial intelligence) models.  The British retailer, Tesco, is well known for their use of data.

Instead of building the largest data store it could, Tesco initially set out to build the smallest store of data that would give useful information. [Quoted in the book: Scoring Points: How Tesco is Winning Customer Loyalty]

In short, store only the information that you are certain you will need to refer to later.  One sneaky trick that I use is to store data that I think may possibly be important in an E-Mail folder or file folder called “Temporary”.  I can always sort through these folders if I really need to find that E-Mail or file.  But this rarely, if ever, happens.  Psychologically, not junking the ‘possibly important’ makes it easier to ensure that my other E-Mail and File Folders only contain essential information that is now much easier to access (because it is not buried amongst countless barely relevant E-Mails and files).

Scan and Evaluate the Data Upfront: Before reading anything in detail, we should scan through the information very quickly asking ourselves three questions:

What? So What? Now What?

What is this information? What does it tell us that will help us or our company? Is it immediately relevant to us?  If we evaluate what we read upfront like this, we will realize that much of what we receive from E-Mails to articles to breaking news can be scanned and then deleted or tossed into that Temporary folder I just wrote about.  This saves us time to focus on important, relevant, and timely information.

Read the Data at the Right Time: After the quick scan, we may determine that the information is valuable but not immediately applicable.  This is the time to store this information and schedule a task to read thoroughly at a time when it would be applicable.  Important information that won’t be relevant for several weeks is usually best to read in several weeks at the time it is relevant.  As with training, where just in time training (the trainee is immediately able to put into practice) is far more effective, just in time information leads to better and more informed decision making.

Conclusion

Managing the data overload is a daily and never-ending task.  We will always be struggling against the “howling hurricane.”  By using these four ideas we should do better in managing our data intake and storage.  This will ensure that we have the right, high quality data at the time it is needed to allow us to make the best decisions to move our companies forward.