I’m a news junkie, and I recently bought a news application for my smartphone. This app was different than others I had seen in that it used technology that aggregated news feeds, pulling in top headlines not just from one source, but from web sites around the world and in real-time. Naturally, I was both excited and curious to read the different perspectives on, say, the President’s most recent trip to Asia.

Using my smartphone, I read the editorial article from the Washington Post. Then I swiped my finger to read the London Times, and then the Frankfurter Allgemeine (thank you translation tools), Just for kicks, I decided to read the same headline as seen from Japan, Italy, and India’s perspective. And, as expected, these were some truly eye-opening reads.

But therein lies the issue. Reading that one topic across six articles and five languages took over half-an-hour. By the time I was finished, I was exhausted. And I still had a laundry list of topics to go! As you can imagine, I had to decide whether the work involved in comprehending all that data was truly worth the tradeoff in time.

We cannot recover our time. In this age of the data deluge, we need to make sense of our world by gathering and sorting through as much noise as possible, deriving patterns from the chaos and being able to develop clear-cut answers, often with the help of computers (see my previous post). Once we have our data and information, we now must face a second consideration: what is the tipping point whereby data becomes Too Much Information?

How many online newspapers must I read through before I’m satisfied that I understand the topics? How much time must pass before I can make decisions as an informed individual?

We can associate this analogy into the context of business, For instance, I have read performance reports written for executives that contain complicated spreadsheets graphs, pages of data, and addendum after addendum of statistics, assumptions, and next steps. But rather than informing these executives, these reports have the opposite effect. The recipients are overwhelmed by TMI, causing then to make poor decisions or suffer under analysis paralysis endemic in many institutions.

Finding the right amount of information appropriate for the moment appears to be a viable solution. This can be very tricky, however, as there is no clear-cut answer on how each individual best processes information; a 30-minute in-depth read into the latest headline for me may be another person’s 5-minute skim. But as analysts continue to strive towards consolidating ambiguous data into more meaningful chunks, we need to recognize that the quantity of the output is just as critical as the quality of the input.

What do you think? Is too much better than not enough? Or is there a way to find a “happy medium?”