You have to do audits regularly. Okay, let’s not call them audits. Just do a little cleanup once in a while. You can even schedule it quarterly, annually, or twice a year, just to get a handle on the things that your team is doing. Look at where you have things you’re not even using, automations that you created, some that you even created accidentally, or ones that are duplicated. Sometimes you have automations running in the background that are just duplicating things, and you’re paying for extra space without even using it. You also have folders that you haven’t used in a while. You have projects that you didn’t close properly. So look at all these things and clean them out. If you want to throw things away, throw them away. Delete them, archive them, remove them. All those fields that someone created for one project, take them out. The ones you created accidentally as well.
You’d see fields or items that just have one letter or word. It shows that they were created accidentally. A lot of these tools allow this where there’s no proper requirement or safeguard in place to prevent you from accidentally creating records. You could just be typing or accidentally touch your keyboard, and it creates something and saves it with incomplete information. So clean all these things up because they sometimes affect your reporting. With some tools and in certain environments, if you create a new item, a new activity, a new task, or a new record, it inherits the properties of that space. So let’s say this space is for landing pages, and you mistakenly create something. It accidentally creates a new activity or a new project, and it’s just going to count as a new landing page when things are being counted, depending on the tool you’re using. This mostly happens in your traditional tools, but it still happens in custom tools as well. So you do have to be careful, look at these things, and constantly filter them out. It’s best to have a setup in place to filter them out, and another setup that mimics the space but shows you all of these items that were wrongly created so you can delete them easily.