Fast, cheap, AND good? Here's how we did it

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50-60% of our tasks were digital clutter. Here's the fix.

I've been putting off a massive cleanup project for way too long.

After our merger last year - combining DataDrivenU and MeasurementMarketing.io into what's now MeasureU - we ended up with digital chaos everywhere.

Two separate ClickUp systems. Multiple Google Drives. Tasks from brands that don't even exist anymore cluttering my project management view.

You know that feeling when you log in and see reminders for a brand you shut down two years ago? Yeah, that was my daily reality.

I kept telling myself someone else would tackle it. But here's what I learned: cleanup projects need three things working together to actually happen.

Leadership Authority

First, someone with real decision-making power has to own it.

You can't expect team members to clean up systems they didn't create, especially when they might not have the authority to delete things or the full context of what matters.

As the leader, I was probably the only one who could make those judgment calls. Waiting for someone else to "step up" was unfair to them and lazy leadership on my part.

Systems Knowledge

Second, you need to understand the 80/20 rule of your systems.

Most businesses use maybe 20% of what's in their project management tools. The other 80% is "just in case" stuff that never gets touched but creates visual noise and decision fatigue.

Our second company value is "Use the system to improve the system." I wasn't living that.

So I decided to make our systems reflect what we're actually doing now, not what we used to do or might do someday.

AI Automation

Third - and this is the game changer - we used AI to handle the bulk work.

We set up MCP servers with Zapier to automatically archive tasks that hadn't received comments or updates in years. Thousands of empty templates and dead projects, gone.

The AI handled maybe 50-60% of the cleanup that would have required manual review.

Here's the kicker: this entire project took about 3 hours of focused time to see results.

In the past, this would have been a months-long slog for someone on the team. Tedious, mind-numbing work that nobody wants to do.

But with AI handling the obvious stuff, I could focus on the decisions that actually needed human judgment.

The old rule was "fast, cheap, good - pick two."

AI is changing that equation. When you combine leadership authority, systems thinking, and AI automation, you can actually have all three.

Sometimes the best business improvement is just cleaning up the mess you've been ignoring.

To Your AI-First Success,
Jeff Sauer

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