It’s easy to throw your hands up in frustrating when you encounter bad data and broken systems. As an ops guy, I’m frequently exposed to these sorts of situations, and I used to get despondent over it. It can make you feel as if nothing is working, and there isn’t time in the day to fix everything that needs fixing.
Of course, the solution to this is to just fix one thing. And then the next thing. One by one. And what’s interesting is as you solve one problem, other problems tend to fade away in significance, or solve themselves when you remove other barriers.
Theres this great puzzle game called The Witness that works a bit like this. All over an island are line puzzles, each similar but containing some new element with no guidance on what they mean, or how they work. I think there’s at least 12-15 distinct systems to learn, each containing dozens of puzzles increasing in complexity. You could view each as an insurmountable task to solve. And solving just one puzzle doesn’t feel like much progress at all. But interestingly, as you solve one segment, you learn clues to help mastering another segment easier. By the end, the speed at which you can solve segments dramatically increases, because the earlier work built on itself.
It’s worth a reminder when it seems like there’s just too much to do. The best thing you can do is start. You may be surprised what fades away from importance once you get going.