Being the guy with the analytical background for most of my career, I’ve often been the person to ask about building a report or two. The challenge, besides figuring out big hairy data problems, is to manage these reporting requests in a way that creates value from data, without burying yourself with requests or creating reporting bloat.

Interestingly, that last bit is the trickiest one. It’s easy to find value in someone’s reporting request and say yes to the work. After all, it has to be important if they’re asking you about it. But the truth is that not all reports are created equal. Some are more meaningful and universally valuable than others. And developing a nose for this will pay off in dividends for any analyst.

The trick to this is properly scoping the request up front. Decide what this report will and won’t do. How the insights will be used. Whether it makes sense as an evergreen report to be used over the long term, or a one-off request. A big part of finding these answers is putting the questions back upon the requester. Why do you need this report? What will you do with this data? How will you disseminate the information? What does this insight change for us?

About a month ago I decided to start a digital declutter experiment, inspired by reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. For at least the past two years I’ve been increasingly wary of the role digital tools, entertainment, and particularly social media have encroached on my life and attention.

The point of the declutter was to hit reset, and rid myself of the obvious offenders for a 30 day period. And the results, now that the experiment is over?

Some online experience I’ve really looked forward to returning to, while others I don’t have much plan to return to. Twitter is a great example of a site I’d habitually check all day every day. But depriving myself of it for 30 days has changed my view of the site – I’ve lost all desire to return to it, at least in any active sense.

Instagram, on the other hand, I’ve missed as it’s a connection between friends and family. It still requires some limits in place to avoid sucking me into it for too much each day, but I think it’s a tool I’ll use sparing moving forward.

Linkedin is an other example of a site that still feels relevant and valuable for me from a professional sense, but it too I’d like to restrict to only a small investment of time each week.

I consider the experiment a success, and a worthwhile one to try. Much like an elimination diet can help you identify food sensitivities and allergies, a digital declutter can help you see the digital parts of your life with a third person perspective, and isolate which experiences are creating value vs causing harm.

I’ve probably written about this very topic before, but one of my greatest pet peeves as a marketer being marketed to is inattention to detail when it comes to email subscriber preferences.

The latest one to set me off is the “you are receiving this message because…” message at the bottom of most standard marketing emails. Companies add this for compliance purposes, and perhaps to create a vague sense of control for their subscribers. But rarely is this message ever helpful, or even accurate.

If you are going to indicate to a subscriber why they are getting an email, you better make damn sure the reason is accurate and believable.

All too often, I’ll see vendors buy a list of names (with me on it), and start sending their monthly newsletter out. The subscription message at the bottom of the messages is invariably “you are receiving this message because you subscribed to our newsletter”.

No I didn’t. And you know I didn’t. Don’t treat your subscribers like they’re idiots. Especially when you haven’t earned the right to communicate with them in the first place.

Perhaps “You are receiving this message because we wanted to buy your attention instead of earn it” doesn’t quite have the right ring to it. But if you’re not willing to be honest in your disclosures, it’s probably a good sign that you might not want to send that email at all.

I’m reading Shop Class as Soulcraft, which has been interesting so far, if a bit verbose and high minded of itself. A few chapters in, the author mentions this concept of blueprinting. This idea of building a complete, higher performance car engine from disparate parts across different manufacturers (instead of just buying one prebuilt).

By careful measuring and hand fitting, the motor can be brought to a higher level of precision than is achieved when you take for granted the fit of aftermarket parts–for example, these intake manifolds—where there is no consistent engineering intention among the various manufacturers.

He then goes on to describe the role the builder must take in the process.

Someone building a higher performance motor combines parts from different makers so he has to be something of an engineer himself, often modifying parts; there is nobody else in charge of making it all work together properly. (And in fact it is common for “high performance” engines to preform wretchedly, worse than stock.

This felt so remarkably similar to my experience in martech that it seemed worthy of mentioning. Despite the consolidation in this industry, despite the platforms that supposedly “do it all”, most practitioners are still building franken-stacks, and for good reason.

The best in class tools in each category are often an order of magnitude more effective, and sometimes even more cost efficient, that buying into an existing platform’s add on functionality. This isn’t a rule, but it certainly is common in my experience.

Our role then, as a marketing technologist, is in blueprinting our stack into a functional, high performing machine. And that often means modification to fit things together. The difference in this analogy between motors and martech is that the martech landscape, though huge, is still finite enough for most vendors to have most common integration use cases figured out.

The second lesson is that simply buying all the high performance parts won’t automatically get you the performance you desire. You’ve got to be willing to take pieces from one tool and leave others, you’ve got to do the legwork to make the various components work together, and be willing to change course when things aren’t playing nice.

The real value to be reaped in a martech stack is reserved for those who are willing to look past the “stock” configuration into something more custom. The equivalent of a tuner car.

There’s two ways you can view a tech migration. As a rip and replace, or a fresh start.

I’ve done both, as each have their use cases. The former comes into play when you’re mostly concerned with keeping the Rube Goldbergian array of internal systems and tools from collapsing with the switch. The latter comes into play when that collapse will have no material consequences, or your systems lack the complexity for a collapse to be all that likely.

While part of this decision is circumstantial, I think it’s mostly a decision based on attitude. If you view a marketing automation system migration, for instance, as a chance to start fresh, to trim out unnecessary fat and focus on building things right from the ground up, you’d be surprised how many “dependencies” melt away from your migration plan.

But if you view every existing system and process as equally valuable and worthy of maintaining exactly as before, you’re more likely to take the rip and replace approach. And in the process, you may bring a lot of extraneous programs with you.

Increasingly I lean towards the reinvention of a fresh start with the migrations I’m involved in. Marketing is defined by reinvention, In teams, creative, and strategy. Why not adopt the same attitude with martech?

If you’re building a piece of furniture, you rarely do it with just the power tools, or just the finishing tools. You may want both, or the work will either lack definition and polish, or take prohibitively long to finish.

You can see a similar dynamic at play in segmentation and targeting, especially in the enterprise. When it comes to finding the exact right contacts to talk to at an organization, it gets harder and harder the further up you move into enterprise. There’s just too many people in these companies to target reliably without a strong sales and marketing partnership.

Marketing has at their disposal the power tools for making the rough cuts and sizes for segmentation. Third party and first party data. Data hygiene and automation tools. All stuff that works well at volume, but loses precision on a person-by-person basis. That’s where sales comes in, with the sandpaper and carving tools to whittling things down further until only the most important data remains. It’s completely manual, but it’s far more precise.

Yet most companies operate as if only one part of the equation is needed. They use all the martech under the sun to identify and target their ideal customer, and wonder why they are still missing opportunities or targeting less-than-ideal prospects.

Others rely to heavily on their sales teams to manually pull the data together, and wonder why those teams are struggling to make quota.

You’ve got to use both to do it right.

Isn’t it funny how much we want to give recommendations, and how little we want to receive them? At a gathering of friends, the conversation inevitably shifts to what’s great on [insert streaming service here]. We can’t WAIT to tell someone about this show that just cannot be missed. We listen with courtesy at their recommendations, but they’re mostly in one ear and out the other. We’re just waiting for them to stop talking so we can talk about our thing.

In fact, once we encounter the rare someone who is genuinely interested in what we have to say, we latch onto them. It’s such a novelty to find someone who wants to listen more than they want to suggest.

But if we’re not listening to recommendations (at least not directly) how do we find out what works and what doesn’t?

The algorithms driving recommendations on these services are increasingly usurping our own social networks in telling us what is and isn’t worth watching.

And it’s not just happening on Netflix. The books we read, the technology we buy, they’re all increasingly motivated by the machine’s recommendations rather that the people around us.

But if you only let the algorithm decide, you’re pretty likely to find something you already like. This is the whole value of the algorithm. It’s weakness, though is uncovering the stuff you don’t like yet. Without a more organic form of recommendation and ideas, we never consider novel alternatives. Stuff we’d never have considered ourselves, but that we might be willing to take a leap with the right prodding.

Maybe instead of trying so hard to find that person who will listen to us, we ought to try and be that person instead.

The common advice about meetings is to try and chunk them together in your day. The argument is it’s better to have four hours back to back of meetings than having them all spread out with little 30 minute breaks in between. After all – what meaningful work can you really get done in 30 minutes?

On one hand, I find this advice to be helpful. I hate having a day with no solid, uninterrupted blocks of time to get things done. And chunking meetings together can be a good way to carve out that time.

But on the other hand, I hate having a wall of meetings. It’s a jump from one discussion to the next, with no chance to digest what the last discussion meant, or to make plans for what to do about it. By the time you reach meeting 3 or 4, it all feels like a bit of a waste of time. It feels like you’re going to need to have these meetings again anyway.

After spending years trying both ways, I don’t think there’s any perfect trick to managing a schedule of meetings, other than the real solution, which is to just have fewer meetings. That’s tougher advice to put into action, but it’s the only option that solves the root of the issue: there’s just not enough time in the day.

We’ve all got to get better at saying no. No to attending meetings that we’re not essential to. No to scheduling meetings with others that cannot be accomplished another way.

After all, as Jason over at Basecamp likes to say, there’s no such thing as a one hour meeting.

I try to abide by the productivity concept of “parking on an incline”. The idea of planning out what you will do the next day or next week ahead of time, so when the time comes, you can get started straight away.

This mostly works great, and every time I fail to do it, I end up scrambling to figure out priorities first thing in the morning, which never works out quite as well.

But I can’t help but notice, especially if I’ve done my planning on a friday for the following week, that what seemed important then may not be so important on Monday.

After I’ve slept on it, priorities shift. New projects emerge.

I’m still always thankful to never be working from a blank slate in the morning, but it’s easy to treat the plans I set forth like they’re written in ink when really they’re written in pencil.

So go ahead and park on an incline for the next day. Just be ready to shift things around a bit once you’re ready to go.

I don’t know about you, but anytime I download an app, there’s a small bit of dread in the pit of my stomach as I know, at some point, that action will turn into interruption, in the form of a push notification I never asked for.

App makers and marketers have gotten so homogeneous in their approach to sign ups that it’s as true as the law of gravity that we’ll get unsolicited messages soon after we do anything to engage with a brand.

And to me, that’s a little frustrating. The maker’s assumption is if you downloaded the app, you must want 12 push notifications a day to keep your eyes in their systems. Surely that serves the customer!

Certainly a huge chunk of users must just accept this as fact and happily live in a storm of notifications. But it makes companies’ “customer focused” missions ring so hollow.

In a way it’s unfortunate that my default action when downloading any new application is to turn off push notifications. I don’t even give the app a chance to prove me wrong – I’m so conditioned to avoid them. And yet there are probably plenty of use cases where a push notification is incredibly useful. Even powerful.

But app makers interpret the absence of an opt out to indicate a user wants the full force attack of push notifications at all times. Why isn’t anyone trying a more nuanced, phased roll in of push notifications. Why isn’t it opt in, instead of opt out?

These are of course all rhetorical questions. But it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider the alternative of app makers focusing on getting you in the door and doing whatever they can to keep you from uninstalling. One where companies must continue to deliver value to earn and expand the user’s attention. One where companies take nothing for granted.