Four nested processing cadences

Why This Is a Rule

Information systems degrade at multiple timescales, and each timescale requires its own maintenance cadence. Daily degradation: new items accumulate faster than they're processed, creating growing backlogs. Weekly degradation: priorities drift as context changes, and items that seemed important on Monday may be irrelevant by Friday. Monthly degradation: information sources that once provided value may have declined in quality, and subscription inflation silently expands your inflow. Quarterly degradation: structural sediment accumulates — orphaned files, stale references, deprecated categories, forgotten projects.

A single cadence catches only one type of degradation. Daily triage alone misses the slow drift and source-quality decline visible only at longer timescales. Monthly audits alone miss the daily backlog accumulation that produces information bankruptcy. The four-cadence system nests shorter cycles within longer ones, each catching the problems invisible to the others.

This parallels Three review altitudes's three-altitude workflow review but applies it specifically to information processing systems. The principle is the same: different review frequencies catch different types of system degradation, and all frequencies are necessary for complete system health.

When This Fires

• When designing the maintenance architecture for any information processing system
• When your system works well for a few weeks then gradually degrades
• When one cadence of review isn't sufficient to keep the system healthy
• Complements Three review altitudes (workflow review altitudes) with the information-system-specific cadence structure

Common Failure Mode

Daily-only processing: doing daily triage faithfully but never stepping back for weekly, monthly, or quarterly perspectives. The daily processing keeps the inbox clear, but source quality degrades unnoticed (monthly issue), priorities drift without correction (weekly issue), and structural clutter accumulates (quarterly issue). The system slowly becomes less valuable despite consistent daily maintenance.

The Protocol

(1) Daily triage (20-30 min): Process incoming items using Triage before processing (triage) and Process inboxes sequentially top-to-bottom, never… (sequential processing). Goal: inbox reaches zero or near-zero. (2) Weekly review (30-45 min): Review what you processed this week. What patterns emerged? Are your priorities still aligned? Are any projects stalled? Adjust next week's focus. (3) Monthly audit (1 hour): Evaluate your information sources. Which subscriptions, feeds, and channels are still providing value? Which are noise? Unsubscribe from low-value sources. Check expiration dates (Monthly expiration sweep). (4) Quarterly purge (2-3 hours): Deep clean the entire system. Archive stale projects, delete unused categories, review and update your organizational structure, retire workflows that haven't been used (Retire workflows inactive for 60+ days…). (5) Schedule all four cadences as recurring calendar events. Each higher cadence includes the lower ones as warm-up: monthly audit starts with that week's review; quarterly purge starts with that month's audit.