What is information audit?

Information audit is a concept in personal epistemology: Regularly audit what you consume and cut sources that produce more noise than signal. Without scheduled review, your information environment silently degrades — and you adapt to the noise without noticing.

Example: Eighteen months ago you subscribed to a fintech newsletter because you were evaluating payment processors for a project. The project shipped. You chose Stripe. The decision is done. But the newsletter keeps arriving — three times a week, 1,200 words each, covering an industry you no longer need to track. You skim most issues in 90 seconds and delete them. That is 4.5 minutes per week, 3.9 hours per year, spent on a source that stopped producing signal the day you chose your vendor. Multiply this by the dozen other subscriptions you accumulated for reasons that no longer apply — the podcast you started during a career pivot you abandoned, the RSS feed from a blog that changed ownership and now publishes SEO filler, the Slack community that was vibrant two years ago and is now 95% self-promotion. None of these sources are bad. They are simply no longer relevant. And without a scheduled review, they persist indefinitely, each one raising the noise floor of your information environment by a small, imperceptible amount.

This concept is part of Phase 7 (Signal vs Noise) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for signal vs noise.