How to ‘Marie Kondo’ Your Salesforce Org

You’ve likely seen or at least heard about Marie Kondo’s approach to cleaning out the clutter in your home and life. On her Netflix show “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” she spends her time going through people’s homes, identifying the items that “spark joy,” and finding appropriate ways to get rid of the rest. So, this got me thinking: can you apply her philosophy to your Salesforce instance? You totally can!

Start with an inventory

First, you need to get a good inventory of all your “clutter” so you can then go through her process. The easiest way to do this is to use the Salesforce Optimizer! Salesforce Optimizer gives you a detailed report on more than 25 org metrics covering everything from storage, fields, custom code, custom layouts for objects, reports and dashboards, and much more. The report that’s generated is your starting point for figuring out which data, fields, objects, reports, dashboards, triggers, etc. “spark joy” within you and your organization.

Identify the “non-joyful” stuff

You have your report generated by the Optimizer, so now you can start to figure out which things people aren’t really using and aren’t bringing joy to you, your team, or your company. Specific things to look for:

• Anything at all owned by an inactive user
• Active Salesforce users who are no longer at your company
• Data that hasn’t been updated in a long time, or is obviously incorrect or outdated
• Objects and fields containing little or no data
• List views that are only for 1 person
• Reports and Dashboards that haven’t been run for a long time
• Old Email templates
• Workflow, Validation Rules, Processes, or Flows that are inactive and unused
• Installed AppExchange packages that haven’t been touched since the install

Decide what to keep and what to toss

As much as it would be nice to immediately purge all the old crud that no one seems to use anymore, chances are that it was added for a reason, even if it doesn’t make sense now. You probably will need to talk to other people or teams to identify which things are really okay to get rid of and which things need to be kept for historical reasons. Some ideas for those who just can’t seem to let go of things:

• Back up the information – worst case, it can live on in a *gasp* spreadsheet, but doesn’t need to clutter up your database
• Aggregate old data – do you really need every single data point? Or do you just need the “annual” or “quarterly” results? You can create a placeholder to store the aggregate information.
• Remove things from page layouts or reports (NOT deleting, just removing) – see if you really need that information, or it’s just there because “it’s always been there”
• Change folder permissions to the minimum level required for people – since there are a bunch of standard report folders which you can’t delete, you can hide them from users that don’t need to see them
• Schedule an “eat and delete” lunch – bribe people with free food, then use that time to have everyone go in and purge their own stuff, with you leading the way as an example to show how to do it. You can also use this as a time to ask questions and get clarity on how people are using (or not) different fields.

Celebrate your newly clean house…I mean Salesforce Environment!

Once you’ve gone through this process, don’t forget to celebrate your newly-cleaned environment! And to make sure that you don’t have to do this all again from scratch, make sure that you have systems and policies in place so that as you embark on your journey from this point forward, you’re only adding “joyful” data and metadata to your Salesforce instance.

What do you think? Any other Marie Kondo tips and tricks for keeping your Salesforce house in order? Please share!