What is information triage prioritization?

Information triage prioritization is a concept in personal epistemology: Not all information is equally valuable — sort by priority before processing.

Example: You sit down Monday morning to process your information backlog. Your inbox has 63 emails. Your read-it-later queue has 18 articles. Your notes app has 11 items captured over the weekend. Your team Slack has 40 unread messages across six channels. That is 132 items waiting for decisions. If you process them in arrival order — first in, first out — you will spend 45 minutes on weekend newsletters before discovering that a client sent a time-sensitive project change request on Saturday afternoon. The request needed a response within 24 hours. It is now Monday at 10:15am. You are late. Not because you were lazy, not because you ignored your inbox, but because you processed in the wrong order. You gave equal attention to every item, which means you gave insufficient priority to the one item that actually mattered on a time scale. Triage would have changed this. A two-minute scan at the top of the session — subject lines, senders, message lengths, time indicators — would have surfaced the client request in the first 90 seconds. You would have processed it first, responded before the deadline, and then worked through the remaining 131 items at whatever pace made sense. The total time spent would have been identical. The outcomes would have been radically different.

This concept is part of Phase 43 (Information Processing) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for information processing.