I've written before about how data accretes, the idea that over time, we accumulate more and more data that becomes increasingly useless over time.

While this is a never-ending challenge of data management, another truism is that small wins accumulate over time. In other words, one of the ways to combat the accretion of data is to continually and consistently work at keeping the data clean.

What I see too often is a one "big push" effort every couple of years (or longer!) to clean up the data. The result is that, for some short period of time, the data is clean, but for most of its life, the data is pretty messy.

Instead, get into the habit of weeding the garden. Take small actions every day or every couple of days, to keep the accretion of data at bay. Over time, small actions turn into big wins.