Being a Salesforce Admin is a highly rewarding job, but it can also be quite challenging! You work with a platform that’s constantly changing, in a business that needs to continually evolve. New cases, system updates, user configuration, and deployments – a seemingly unending number of tasks!
If your to-do list is feeling insurmountable, here’s what you can do to prevent burning out…
Break It Down
I’ve spoken to admins who can have more than 50 actionable items on their list. With a list that size, or any size for that matter, the first thing you need to do is break it down. There’s a couple of ways you might like to segment it:
- Project and daily ad hoc work
- Categories (e.g. objects, flows, permissions)
- Clouds (e.g. Sales, Service, Tableau)
- Business unit (e.g. account executives, customer success managers, alliances)
You have a finite number of hours in a day. You also want to go home by 6 pm. Once you’ve segmented your list, assign an estimated length of time it’ll take to complete each task. This will give you an idea of how (un)manageable your day, week, or month is looking. You’ll then be able to…
Prioritize
I may well be preaching to the choir, but you need to prioritize your work. Not all work is created equally valuable. It’s also not all on you to decide which pieces of work are most important.
When prioritizing work, the common equation is “value of task time to deliver = priority”. However, proceed with caution. “Value” is multifaceted – we should think holistically about what constitutes value. Implementing features that have tangible ROI savings such as time or cost are great, but small things that improve quality of life and make users happy where ROI may not be obvious are also valuable.
A common trap is to prioritize based on the order in which requests come in. This is where working with stakeholders across your organization, such as business analysts, architects, and leadership, is important. Each request should be individually assessed on its merits and value.

Stay in Scope
Scope creep is common, and poor prioritization can compound its effect. If it’s not in scope, it’s not on your list!
To be able to prioritize and scope effectively, user stories need to be airtight. If requirements are unclear, it’s in your power to ask questions of the business until you have user stories that are clear and well-defined. Questioning is your superpower.
For great advice on scope and effective questioning, I recommend following Jodi Hrbek and reading her book “Rock Your Role as a Salesforce Admin”, which she discusses on DevOps Diaries.
Take Requests from a Single Channel
While you’re not an order taker (see effective questioning above), there should be one consistent way for the business to submit user stories and feature requests.
Your to-do list will feel hectic if you’re taking requests on slips of paper from meetings, a recording of a Google Meet, Slack channels and DM’s, JIRA, and conversations by the cooler. That’s too many places to keep track of!
Having a kanban-style management system like JIRA is great for managing and prioritizing work, as well as seeing what stage an individual task is at. There are also great automated integration capabilities where business users (or your team!) can create tickets from within Slack – never having to leave the place they work!
If you don’t have this set up already, it can create some friction, especially if there’s someone (usually senior-level) coming at you outside of your chosen channel. But, without a ticket in your system, the request doesn’t exist!
Get the Tools You Need
Trying to build great applications without the tools you need is hard – you wouldn’t dig a trench with a spoon!
There are a whole host of tools out there designed to improve your experience as an admin. Take deployments, for example – wrestling with change sets to deploy your amazing Flow and related components isn’t fun. It can leave you allotting a lot of time to deployments where time’s better spent building the next thing.

Finally, Eat the Frog
Once you’ve done all of the above, you still might still have a frog to eat – let me explain. You don’t want to eat the frog, but it has to be done! So, you keep putting it off, waiting for the perfect time or for the motivation, which never comes. But, for every day you don’t eat the frog, it gets bigger and bigger. What was once a small frog is now a huge frog, and you don’t know how you’ll ever eat it!
This is an analogy I use a lot when thinking about the hard or less enjoyable tasks on our list. The sooner you get them done, the easier it will be. We all procrastinate from time to time, but routinely putting off tricky tasks only serves as an anxiety generator, with tasks becoming unnecessarily overwhelming and difficult. The better you get at eating the frog, the better outcomes you’ll have…