my month end data cleanse

There are people out there that find that cleaning relaxes them, that it suitably distracts them from their reality for long enough to dispense of any manifested frustration. I am not one of those people, there are other activities that I find relaxing and cleaning isn't one of them, it's a chore that I attend to when I need to and that is that.

So you can imagine my affinity for spending my whole day scrubbing data in order for it to more closely reflect 'reality,' mind numbing stuff.

The demand for data intensifies as the month progresses, no month end would be complete without doing some data export into excel and pivoting it. Once you have mastered the language of numbers its preparation is something, just like cleaning that should be left to those people, who enjoy doing it.

These days we spend an infinite amount of time attempting to make 'pure, rational, data driven decisions' but very seldom live the consequences. In your personal life, you live your decisions, you instinctively assimilate and decide in the knowledge that it's your bed and no matter how cliched you have to sleep in it. Business decisions though are often removed of this type of consequence, of course there are consequences but you don't always have to live with the outcomes.

And as somebody near the top of the food chain recently pointed out: 'What has happened to the company which used to take 80% of the data? We now take 150% of the data, miss the opportunity and then are still talking about it!'