Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of one’s signal-to-noise ratio. For those who may not be familiar with the term, Wikipedia gives a pretty decent explanation:

Signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is.

The sheer ease of publicly posting little snippets of whatever mindless ramblings you feel like offering up to the world makes it hard not to do just that, and do it often. But no one really wants to read that.

I realized recently that each month since I created my @tomhenrich account, I’ve tweeted significantly more than in the previous month (with the exception of a minor dip in October). I was tweeting too much and too often, without adding much value to the streams of anyone who may be following me. I even called myself out on it publicly. Ever since, I’ve been trying to seriously police my own tweeting – asking “Is this really worth posting? Is anyone going to find value in this?”

And so we come back to the idea of signal vs noise. We’re all contributing to the noise. And that’s okay. But we need to focus on being the signal. We need to consciously try to add value to other’s lives whenever possible. Not every tweet has to be life-changing. Not every conversation you have in the hallway needs to inspire someone. But we can’t constantly shout into the void.

So one of my new goals, both online and off, is to increase my personal signal-to-noise ratio. If that means I just keep my mouth shut more often than it’s open, so be it. Quitting Twitter, deleting my Facebook account, etc? Not going to happen. But I’m certainly going to think more before speaking, before tweeting, before posting.

How’s your signal-to-noise ratio?