Earlier today, I helped a friend clean his storage locker. He’s been holding onto things for far too long, and needed someone to help him discard things.

Being a minimalist, I told him to throw away, recycle, or donate nearly everything. Him, being a sentimentalist, listened to me about half of the time. Everything else went back into the locker.

The experience reminded me that every once in a while, we should check our Salesforce locker and tidy up. This means things like

  • Validating that custom fields are actually being used
  • Deleting unnecessary page layouts and compact layouts
  • Cleaning up reports and report folders
  • Merging duplicate data
  • Converting processes and workflows to flows
  • Optimizing flows to the latest functionality
  • Refactoring code to use the standard coding pattern
  • Adding automation to help accelerate processes

Yes, this can be a long and painful exercise. But once you’re done, Salesforce will have less technical debt and work better for you and your clients.

The takeaway
When was the last time you looked at your Salesforce instance for technical debt?

As with physical items, if you haven’t used it in two years, you probably don’t need it anymore. Thank it for being in your life, and let it go.

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Salesforce