Signal v.s. Noise

Your attention is a limited resource, continuously consumed by by any number of things, such as information, relationships, activities, and commitments. These attention-grabbing inputs can be broadly grouped into two categories:

Signal
Noise

"Signal" refers to anything that competes for your attention but you find relevant, meaningful, or valuable in some way. This could be things like:

Newsletters you find personally meaningful
Recommendations for movies you end up loving
News that causes a positive change in your behavior
Etc

"Noise" refers to anything that competes for your attention but you do not find relevant, meaningful, or valuable. This could be things like:

Marketing emails
Spam calls
Group chats that don't concern you
Reddit threads that might be entertaining but are ultimately a distraction
Etc

If you're striving to live a life with purpose and intentionality, a good heuristic is to try and increase your life's signal-to-noise ratio:

S i g n a l - t o - N o i s e R a t i o = \frac{S i g n a l}{N o i s e}

That is, out of all the things - information, relationships, activities, and commitments - that are vying for your attention, you should aim to increase the things that you consider "signal" and eliminate the things you consider "noise." What you consider "signal" and "noise" is entirely up to you and your life's priorities.