I don’t know about you, but one of my favorite things about the holidays is all of the great food that we get to eat. In just a month-and-a-half, we get to enjoy a beautiful Thanksgiving Turkey, succulent Holiday ham, and our favorite hors d’oeuvres on New Year’s Eve. It’s during these wonderful days I find myself overindulging in these rich, delicious foods.

With the new year comes new resolutions, and mine this year once again include losing weight (but this time I mean it.) It’s also a great time to make resolutions for your career or business, such as aiming to be more decisive or to better understand your customers. When the first step towards achieving those resolutions involves gathering data, just like when dieting it’s important that you don’t overindulge.

Recent trends have continued towards gathering as much data as you can and using it to make data-driven decisions. As I’m sure you know, here at Corona we love data; everything we do is driven by data. However, having too much data can often-times be crippling. You might have more than you know what to do with, or you could simply not know how to properly analyze it. It’s also possible that, even if all of that data is analyzed, you could be faced with a paralyzing number of options and decisions to be made.

So how can you ensure you collect a healthy amount of the right data? Similar to dieting, it’s important to always start with a clearly defined goal. Once your goals are well-defined, they inform the rest of the process: What questions should be answered? How is the data gathered – is there previously collected data that can be used, or should new data be gathered from survey(s), focus groups, or something else? What analyses need to be done to accurately answer the questions? Finally, the goals will let you know if you’re in over your head and need help.

Hopefully we can all stick to our resolutions, because when you look back a year from now you’ll only be thankful you did.