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Tuesday 23 December 2014

10 Tips for Getting Out of a Slump

12 Days of Salesforce: 10 Tips for Getting Out of a Slump

By the time the holidays have concluded, people have a mountain of work that they've fallen behind on, which does little to alleviate the stress of slumping. 
Often the most difficult parts of being in a slump is the ability to get out of it. That's why, for this 10th day in our 12 Days of Salesforce series, we decided to feature some tips for getting out of a slump you may have fallen into this December.


Here are the 10 tips: 

1. Acknowledge that You're Only Human

The holiday season especially can put too much on your plate (and we're not talking about too many servings of Christmas ham and cookies). The "life" portion of work-life balance becomes front-and-center, but that doesn't mean that work demands have diminished.
You cannot maintain energy and focus if you're trying to accomplish too many goals at once, like connecting with family, throwing a rockin' holiday party, and finishing up on your end-of-year planning for work. Take some time to write down what your priorities are and then re-evaluate them. Are you obsessing a bit too much over holiday party decor? Serve enough spiked eggnog, and people will hardly notice the decor! Does that work project need to get done by a certain date, or are you setting unrealistic expectations? Take a look at the list and then re-prioritize if applicable.

2. Get Excited

When you're in a slump, it's easy to look at things from a glass half-empty perspective. That party that should be really fun to attend just ends up being another slot occupied on your calendar that is causing you stress. When you find yourself spiraling into the "everything just being another item on your to-do list" mindset, try to take a step back and realize that the holiday season is supposed to be FUN!

3. Get Support

Often these insights are difficult to discover on your own, which is why it's important to find someone to vent with, but also someone who is willing to speak up and let you know when you're being a little ridiculous. This could be a spouse, a trusted friend, or even a licensed professional — whoever helps you take inventory of your priorities and make changes when necessary. 

4. Start Small 

You won't be able to upend your to-do list and start fresh overnight, so starting small is key. Whether this means RSVPing to some parties or spending an afternoon gift shopping, there's no reason that everything needs to get done all at once — even if it may feel that way. Little successes become bigger ones when you put them all together. 

5. And Then Build on the Small Successes

Keep the momentum going by building on each of these little accomplishments. You may write one thank you note on Monday, two on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, and so on. Little by little, you're slowly building towards getting yourself back on track with a clear mind. 

6. Make an "I Did" Instead of a "To-Do" List

To-do lists can be amazing for keeping yourself on-task; but when you're in a slump, often there's nothing more daunting than a list that feels like it's growing by the second. Instead, take a more positive approach and list things that you've accomplished throughout the day: responded to that important email, nailed a presentation, took out the trash. 

7. Focus on the Benefits, Not the Difficulties

Do you see a theme here? When it comes to a slump, the most crucial element of turning the tables is sparking some positivity — even when that's the last thing you may feel like doing. Rather than focusing on how visiting family is going to be a pain because of the two-hour drive in bad weather, think about the benefits: spending time with the people you love. Write it down if necessary as a little reminder to stay positive!

8. Make Small Changes to Your Routine

A slump can often come from the monotony of routine. By making small changes and mixing it up, you'll feel better and more energized. This could mean going for a jog after work, meditating a few minutes before bedtime, cooking something instead of picking up dinner from your usual spot, or even just getting coffee from a different coffee shop (maybe one that requires a bit of a walk). 

9. Read 

Sitting down with a good book, perhaps with some tea and a fuzzy blanket, can have amazing calming effect. You can also read material that relates to your specific goal, like a book on being a better manager or a blog post about work-life balance

10. Ban Your Biggest Time-Waster

When a person is stressed out and in a slump, often we take comfort in our little time-wasters — scrolling through Facebook, a favorite video game, etc. But these time-wasters are more detrimental than usual when a person is in a slump and they can be a black hole where all of your motivation and productivity disappears. So set some boundaries and ban these time-wasters, even if it's just for a day or a week.  
The holidays have gotten a bit of a reputation for being bittersweet — there's lots of fun to be had, but with that comes a lot of stress and sometimes a work slump. Being able to recognize when you're in a slump is the key, and then use these ten tips to turn the tables.

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                                                            By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

    Monday 15 December 2014

    A New Salesforce E-Book

    Accelerate Your Sales Performance: A New Salesforce E-Book
    Some of the best sales professionals are those who have created the right strategies and applied the right techniques to take some of the chill out of cold calling. Handled correctly, cold calling can not only be a more pleasant activity, but a far more effective one as well.


    What the E-Book Is About 
    Created from the teachings of the best frontline Salesforce managers, this book will tell you:
    •  Best practices to prepare for a call
    •  How to efficiently organize your sales team
    •  Tips on how to make a connection every time
    •  Why the phone beats email
    •  Great tools to measure yourself and stay organized.
    •  A list of external resources for further study
    Take advantage of this e-book, created from the experience of the best front-line salesforce.com managers. Among many others, you'll learn actionable tips that will help you:
    • Increase outbound sales effectiveness
    • Make lasting connections with your prospects
    • Improve your ability to sell as a team
    Reference:


                                                            By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd

    Monday 8 December 2014

    Solving Java Memory Regressions with Zero Overhead and High Accuracy

    Customer trust is Salesforce’s highest priority. Our customers trust us with their data and that our software platform will perform reliably. They also trust that our applications and architecture will be the fastest and most responsive user experience. That’s why performance is at the top of our priorities.
    The Salesforce Performance Engineering team is tasked with ensuring that the platform and SaaS applications perform at the highest level.  Our team conducts extensive performance tests continually. We monitor and analyze the results and resolve any regressions that are found. Even a few percentage points degradation in performance is not allowed to go into production.
    The performance testing is done in the form of workloads. A workload is a repeatable load test consisting of a set of user requests that exercise specific features or functionalities (Apex cache, Visualforce pages, or Chatter feeds for example). A given workload is run periodically, usually daily, on the latest code version at that time. We achieve repeatability and high accuracy of the test through full automation of the run, data collection, and data analysis.  The performance engineering team relies mostly on open source tools (e.g., JMeter for generating load) and tools developed in-house (e.g., test automation orchestration, data collection, and results processing).

    Memory Allocations Heavily Influence Application Performance

    Application performance depends on many factors, including: the architecture of the system,  algorithms used to achieve given functionality, efficiencies of the code and database queries, cache system, the database, and so on. Among these factors, object allocations play an important role in Java application performance, or any other application utilizing a VM that manages application memory. An increase in the number and/or size of objects allocated may take more operations by the application code.  Also, a higher object allocation rate usually leads to an increase in the overhead of memory management by the host VM.

    Solving Memory Regressions in a Complex Application

    While detecting memory regressions is a relatively easy task, finding the root cause of the increase in memory allocations is usually a very hard problem to tackle. A number of commercial and open source tools exist that aim to help in solving this problem. Commercial tools like YourKit can track object allocations by instrumenting bytecode of the application. Instrumentation is done by an agent attached to the JVM at startup. Another approach to solve memory regressions are heap dumps taken at runtime of the app and inspected later with tools like Eclipse Memory Analyser (MAT), YourKit, etc. In addition to that, ThreadMXBean which is part of JMX MBeans can be used to estimate amount of memory allocated in a given transaction. This usually requires embedding an instrumentation framework in the application that collects and records this data in the logs for every transaction executed by the application.

    Collecting Information About Allocated Objects with Zero Overhead

    If these approaches do not help, what can we do to solve memory allocation regressions? Let’s summarize what we need to succeed:
    1. We want to record all object allocations and associated parameters (e.g. object type and amount of bytes allocated) during the run of our workload.
    2. We do not want our workload to be impaired by overhead either caused by bytecode instrumentation, or overhead associated with collecting the data about allocated objects by the profiling agent.
    3. We need to ensure high accuracy of the results collected in test experiments.

    Illustartion:

    A simple Java application that allocates double arrays wrapped in class MyDoubleArray. In the base run, the application allocates 2000 MyDoubleArray objects each containing adouble[102400] array. The regressed version of the code allocates the same number of MyDoubleArray objects, but with the double array larger by 100 elements (i.e., double[102500]). Comparison of heap dumps produced as the result of the algorithm we discussed show this difference in the amount of memory occupied by double[] (see the below image). Note that other objects have the same count and occupy the same space in the 2 heap dumps.







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                                                            By Applogic IT Solutions India Pvt Ltd
                                                                    

    Monday 1 December 2014

    7 Key takeaways from Dreamforce 2014

    A compelling list of takeaways is evidence of a great conference. Those who attended Dreamforce 2014 f put together a list of the lessons that have stuck with them through all the post-event madness. We’re sure you have your own list of ideas that resonated with the attendees from your organization, but we want to share our top seven with you





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