What does it mean that the cost of staying informed about everything?

Every minute spent consuming noise is a minute stolen from depth. The cost of staying informed about everything is understanding nothing well enough to act on it.

Example: A product manager reads five industry newsletters, three Slack channels, two subreddits, a curated Twitter list, and a daily news digest — every morning before starting actual work. She can reference any topic in a meeting. She sounds informed. But when asked to make a strategic recommendation on her own product's positioning, she defers. She needs "more data." She always needs more data. Her breadth of awareness has become a substitute for the depth of understanding that decisions require. She is not informed. She is saturated. And saturation feels like knowledge until someone asks you to act on it.

Try this: Conduct an information cost audit. List every source you check daily or weekly: news sites, newsletters, social feeds, Slack channels, podcasts, group chats. For each, estimate the minutes per day you spend on it. Then answer three questions: (1) What decision have I made better in the last 30 days because of this source? (2) What would I miss if I stopped checking it for two weeks? (3) What could I do with that time instead? Any source that fails all three questions is noise you are paying for with attention. Remove or batch it.