31 Mar 2026 Enough with the noise

I have a notebook problem. It isn’t critical. More chronic. Enough that when I was looking for something in one of my notebooks the other day, I got distracted by something I’d scribbled down and completely forgotten:

Clarity = signal / noise

Claude Shannon.

So I looked him up.

According to Google, Shannon was a mathematician who basically invented information theory in the 1940s. What information theory is took another look up, but what I found out is he was trying to solve a very specific technical problem: how do you transmit data clearly over a noisy telephone line?

Not exactly where I expected my afternoon to go. And yet.

The idea is simple. Signal is the thing that matters. Noise is everything in the way. Clarity doesn’t come from adding more. It comes from removing what’s blocking the signal.

Now I keep seeing it everywhere.

Take “I hope this email finds you well.” Nobody has ever read that sentence and felt found. It’s just noise we’ve all agreed to ignore.

Homes do the same thing.

Stuff accumulates without you quite deciding to keep it. There’s the chair in the bedroom that’s basically an unpaid valet. And that corner where things land when no one knows where they belong. The counter that hasn’t been fully clear in ages. Nothing dramatically wrong, just extra. And somehow the whole space feels harder than it should.

When we clean a home, really clean it, part of what we’re doing is clearing what’s in the way so the room can finally say what it’s supposed to say.

Shannon was thinking about telephone wires.

But I think he accidentally explained why a clean kitchen can change your whole mood.

Cheerfully,