Four nested processing cadences

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.