On saying no to dashboards

When a client asks for "a dashboard", I have learned to ask one question before I write a line of SQL: what decision will this dashboard change?

About half the time, the honest answer is "none, I just want to feel like I am on top of it". That is a real need, but a dashboard is the wrong shape for it. A weekly written summary, or a single number in a Slack channel, is almost always better.