Signal-to-Noise Ratio

To be a sustainable documentation system, it must have a high signal-to-noise ratio. In other words, there should be a lot of useful signal and very little noise.

In general, as the volume of information increases, the amount of noise tends to grow, leaving fewer meaningful signals. For example, consider someone who jots down everything that looks useful throughout their life, in chronological order. When that happens, even if you try to find something related to a particular topic, there is simply too much noise (= unrelated information). Eventually, the entire set of notes gets discarded. Information should, in general, become more useful to you the more it accumulates — but in this case, the more information piles up, the less useful it becomes.

To solve the signal-to-noise ratio problem, it is important to form a working subset. Even at the cost of losing some information, it is better than having all of it discarded. Focus on use cases, think about in what context you would want this information, and organize your documents so that the ones relevant to that context can be seen at a glance.

The concept of signal-to-noise ratio can be applied across a wide range of domains.

• The ratio of things you want to do versus things you don’t
• Meaningful emails versus meaningless emails
• Slack channels you read versus Slack channels you don’t

Links

• Zettelkasten
  • Zettelkasten stores notes by dividing them into “fleeting notes,” “literature notes,” and “permanent notes.”
  • The key is to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of “permanent notes” very high (= to fill them with meaningful signals).
  • By linking notes that are related to one another, only notes similar to the context you are looking for remain.
• Worse is better
  • A simple system that covers 50–80% of use cases can sometimes succeed. The signal doesn’t need to be excessively high.