What is signal?
Signal is a term used to describe important information. Anything that is not signal should be considered noise, which is the opposite of signal.
I recently took a couple weeks off work, and while sifting through various emails when I returned, I started to notice a pattern of noise vs signal. Noise being emails that didn't hold any significant information. They were marked as read and discarded, while anything that was deemed signal was moved to a "to do" email folder that I would later dig into. Most of the time emails may not fall exactly in one bucket or another, but it's important practice to start noticing what is providing value and what isn't. Remove recurring emails or updates that you don't find yourself using, they create the mental overhead we are calling noise.
It also makes one consider when we communicate how much of what we output is noise vs signal.
The goal is to be as high signal as possible.
When you speak, people will start to listen, because what you say is valuable. If you are constantly sending out noise, it may get lost in a sea of other noisy messages.
For example, am I including the right people on the email? An update on a project might be signal to some recipients and noise for others. The key is to be conscious of what you are sending and how it will be interpreted.
How can I be more high signal?
Some ways I've found to be high signal in emails is to highlight action items, and clearly define (if possible) who is responsible for the specific ask. Outlook allows you to tag individuals in your active directory, which is a very handy tool for this practice.
Signal is not only reserved for written communication, we see it in all sorts of mediums. When someone is presenting in a meeting for example, are they highlighting the most important information or draining a powerpoint slide?
Say less
My #1 tip for being more high signal is to say less. Often in meetings we spend a few minutes justifying our reasoning before making our point, to hopefully bring along others to our way of thinking. Instead I tend to make my point and elaborate if there are questions.
It's generally easy to identify incoming noise, but orders of magnitude more difficult to be conscious of the noise we are outputting. If you have any tips or tricks for being more high signal, please comment and share below!
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