In 1948, Claude Shannon proved something quietly optimistic: noise doesn’t kill communication. It just limits speed.

However corrupted the channel, a message can still get through reliably — you simply can’t send it as fast. Below a channel’s capacity, near-perfect communication is possible. That single result made the modern world: every phone call, every file transfer, every message that arrives intact was Shannon’s theorem, cashed in.

Seventy-eight years later, the noisy channel is my inbox. Slack, email, WhatsApp, a calendar invite with no description. This is where my everyday life gets negotiated — tasks assigned, promises made, plans quietly abandoned.

And the theorem still holds. The meaning gets through. It just gets through slowly.

The noise in human channels

“Whenever you get a chance, no rush” — from one person, that means today. “We should catch up soon” — usually just a warm goodbye. “Did you see my email?” — a nudge dressed as a question.

People are not consistent, either. They say they want fewer meetings, then accept every invite. They make promises to end a conversation, not to keep it. The stream is noisy, and the sender is part of the noise.

None of this makes understanding impossible. It makes understanding expensive. Decoding what people mean takes rereads, follow-ups, remembered history, second-guessing at midnight. That is the speed limit, paid in attention.

Paying the toll faster

Shannon’s engineers beat noise with error-correcting codes — clever redundancy that recovers the message. Human channels have their own codes:

Learn each person separately. Everyone distorts meaning in their own way. Sarah’s “no rush” historically means two days. Mark asks “any update?” exactly once before he escalates. The pattern of what happened after the words decodes the words.

Trust repetition. One mention of “we should catch up” is background noise. Three mentions across two weeks is real intent. Genuine wants come back. Small talk doesn’t.

Treat vagueness as information. “Maybe we could look into it” was chosen — it signals low stakes, or a relationship being protected. Turning every soft hint into a hard commitment doesn’t decode the message. It destroys half of it.

When the signal is too weak — ask. Shannon proved this case too: below a certain point, no receiver can decode reliably. The right move isn’t a smarter guess. It’s a question: “want me to track this?”

Applied by hand, these rules work. But they are the toll — the deliberate slowness that noisy channels demand. This is precisely what an assistant that reads my todos and comms should do for me: learn the people, count the repetitions, keep the receipts, ask when unsure.

The takeaway

Noise limits speed. That is the whole game — meaning always gets through eventually, and the only question is who pays the decoding toll: my attention, or my toolkit.

Get yourself a comms toolkit. Get ahead — and get peace of mind.