The signal to noise ratio, as Steve Jobs used it
By Mirco Neri
Kevin O'Leary tells a story about working near Steve Jobs in the early nineties. Jobs would ask him what he was doing that day, and the answer that satisfied him was never a plan or a vision. It was three things. Three things that had to be finished before the day ended, and nothing else counted. O'Leary says Jobs called everything outside those three things noise, and he meant it literally: the phone call from your aunt, the coffee with someone who wanted to talk, the meeting that could have been an email. The ratio of signal to noise was the only productivity measure Jobs cared about, and O'Leary puts his at roughly eighty twenty, with the eighty on the three things.
I read that story for the first time last year and recognised it immediately, because I run a trading desk and a trading desk is a noise machine.
What a noisy morning looks like
Singapore gasoil opens and I have a position in the spread. There are forty people in various chats with opinions about the spread. Three brokers are calling. There is a news flow that would take a full-time analyst to read. There is my inbox. There is an alert about refinery maintenance that may or may not matter. And somewhere in all of that is the one thing that actually decides whether I make or lose money today, and it is usually something I already knew yesterday, wrote down, and then let get buried.
The version of the ratio I have come to believe in is slightly different from the Jobs version, and the difference matters.
Jobs could treat everything outside his three things as noise because he had an entire company to absorb it. Someone else answered the aunt. Most of us do not have that. The noise still has to be handled by somebody, and that somebody is you, at some point in the day. So the ratio cannot be about what you allow to reach you. It has to be about what you let decide your day.
Noise arrives first
That is a sequencing problem, and it is where almost everyone, including me until recently, gets it backwards. We open the day by processing noise, because noise arrives first and arrives loudly, and we tell ourselves we will get to the signal once the inbox is clear. The inbox is never clear. By eleven the three things have been displaced by eleven things, each of which felt urgent for about twenty minutes.
Jobs did not have this problem because he had the discipline, and by every account it cost the people around him a great deal. O'Leary describes emails at half past two in the morning with an expectation of a reply. I do not think most of us want to pay that price, and I do not think we have to. The discipline Jobs supplied by force of personality can be supplied by a routine.
What this looks like with Athena
Here is the routine, as I actually run it. I built Athena for this, so I will describe it plainly.
Once, when something becomes a real priority, I tell Athena. A sentence is enough: "The Q4 hedging review matters more than anything else this month." I do this maybe twice a week. That is the only input the routine needs.
Every morning, before I open a chat, an inbox or a price screen, I read the briefing Athena has written from everything I have told it. It is short. It says what deserves attention today, which is usually three things. It names the one thing not to drop. And it tells me if something I said mattered in September has not been touched since. That last line is the one Jobs never had, and it is the one I would miss most.
Then the noise can come, and it does, but it arrives into a day that already has a shape. The three things were decided before anything else got a vote.
In the evening Athena asks me one question about the day. I answer in a sentence. That is how it knows, tomorrow, what moved and what did not.
The forgotten half of the ratio
Noise is not only interruptions. It is also your own old priorities. The thing you said mattered three weeks ago and then stopped thinking about is noise now, in the sense that it clutters the list without ever getting done. Jobs handled that when he came back to Apple in 1997 and cut the product line down to four. He was removing things the company had once decided were signal and had never formally un-decided. Most of us carry around a product line like that in our heads.
So the question I ask now, every morning, is a slightly longer version of the one Jobs asked O'Leary. Which three things today, and which of the things I have been calling important for a month am I ready to admit are noise. The briefing asks it for me, because I would not ask it myself. Answering it is uncomfortable, and it is the whole game.