Knowing when NOT to build the dashboard is the skill

A dashboard is not a deliverable. It's a subscription - refresh, maintenance, questions, "can we add one more page", eventual archaeology when it breaks and its author is gone. You're not building it. You're adopting it.

Most requests don't need one. The checklist I run before agreeing:

Does this question repeat, or does it just feel important today? One-off question, one-off analysis - answer it, close it, done.

Does anyone need to WATCH this number, or do they need to know when it crosses a line? That's an alert, not a report. Is there an owner who'll return to it monthly, or will it join the workspace graveyard by Q2?

Can the underlying process just be fixed instead of monitored forever? Monitoring a broken process is a weird form of acceptance.

The honest ratio I've seen: maybe a third of existing dashboards pass this checklist. The rest are one-off analyses that got promoted to permanent residency because building felt more productive than answering.

And here's the timely part: AI is collapsing the cost of building, which removes the last natural brake. When a dashboard cost two weeks, someone occasionally asked "is this worth two weeks?" At two hours, nobody asks anything. The graveyard is about to get very well-designed headstones.