One of the qualities that makes Salesforce admins so awesome is their propensity for being lifelong learners. In fact, learning is half the fun of being an admin; in this career, challenges are always met with a spirited “bring it on!” Salesforce admins know that there is always room to improve and do an even better job.

7 Essential Productivity Tips for Salesforce Admins

So whether you’ve been a Salesforce administrator for just a month or 15+ years, here are some of the best tried-and-true productivity tips that we’ve gathered over the years from seasoned admins in a multitude of industries. Use these tricks to grow your efficiency and continue being the awesome admin that you are.

Remove all distractions

This is the golden productivity rule!

If you realize you’re constantly interrupted by non-urgent calls and messages, you should turn off unnecessary notifications while you work. Also, to help guide your focus, you can close all of the tabs which are not needed in your browser.

There are apps and chrome extensions available, like Salesforce Inspector or ORGanizer for Salesforce, which can be useful for productivity.

Stay Current on Release Notes

As we said before, admins never stop learning and improving, and this is true for Salesforce too. Salesforce is constantly investing in the innovation of their product, which means that every year it gets better and better. If you’re an admin, you don’t want to miss out on new features that could help both you and your users improve efficiency and be more productive.

Lucky for you, Salesforce introduces a new set of release notes three times a year to coincide with their triannual updates. Keeping up to date with these (along with completing the most recent certification maintenance trailhead modules) will ensure that you never miss out on new features that could help you be more productive.

See how each task fits into the bigger picture

Your career as an admin is founded on your technical skills and knowledge, but when you rely on those skills to solve daily issues, it’s easy to forget about your role as a professional in the entire organization. Each task, no matter how small or big it is, impacts business processes, the user, and the entire organization.

When you develop the habit of seeing how an individual task affects the bigger picture, you realize what is more important, and then can better prioritize.

Consider Multiple Ways of Solving Problems

In Salesforce, there’s never just one way of doing things — there’s several. Take automation for example: You could use workflows, process builder, flows, or apex triggers. That’s part of what’s so great about Salesforce: there’s so many different paths to the end goal. Be sure to learn multiple ways of doing things, because eventually you’ll rely on those options for efficiency. Some projects may be better suited for using one workflow, while others are better off with another workflow. It all depends on the project details and what you’re trying to accomplish. The key is to always default to the most efficient and maintainable way of getting things done.

Monitor User Adoption Closely

Let’s say you’ve put in long hours building a new app, creating a custom object, or adding new fields and record types to an existing object. A lot of time and effort went into these solutions, and your users should see that, right? Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Creating solutions that aren’t being used hurts your own productivity, because you could’ve been working on more valuable projects, and it hurts your users’ productivity, since they’re not receiving the tools they need.

For this reason, it’s important to monitor user adoption to see what your users are and aren’t using. If a solution has high adoption rates, great — if not, you can gather information about why adoption is low by asking questions, then go back to the drawing board. Use tools like the native Adoption Dashboards by Salesforce Labs or Salesforce Shield’s Event Monitoring feature to track adoption.

Measure your achievements

As a Salesforce agent, you’re always building dashboards and reports for your bosses and clients. You know how to quantify performance, so implement that skill by measuring your own productivity.

You can create a dashboard for all packages, apps, licenses, and other details. This will not only help you answer some questions you get from your executives, but will also keep you updated on your own performance.

Tap into Your Puzzle Solving Skills

Salesforce admins are puzzle solvers by nature and have a knack for getting to the root of issues quickly. You get requests or complaints from users all the time, some of which may not be accurately described. Be the puzzle solver you were born to be. Ask leading questions to get the root of the problem. Ask yourself why your users are requesting a particular feature before thinking about how you will implement it — these questions will help you determine the best course of action, and will ultimately save your organization time and headaches.

Ready to start your Salesforce Admin Journey?

Salesforce Administrators are a vital bridge between business and technology, earning upwards of $107,510 annually. Get your Salesforce career in shape by earning an administrator credential in just 6 months with our flexible, mentor-based training. Click here to enroll or learn more about our Salesforce administrator certification training.