Automate Your Agency

How do I use ClickUp like a pro?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 18

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In the final episode of our project management system exploration series, we're diving deep into the feature-rich and highly customizable ClickUp.

As ClickUp enthusiasts who've leveraged its power to streamline operations for numerous clients, Alane and Micah are here to demystify this robust platform. Join us in this episode of Automate Your Agency as Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson unpack the complexities of ClickUp and reveal their favorite features that can help elevate your business's productivity and scalability.

Listen in for actionable insights on:

  • Navigating ClickUp's unique hierarchy
  • Simplifying the Home Screen for better task management
  • Harnessing the power of custom fields, task statuses, and automation
  • Creating efficient dashboards and views for enhanced project visibility
  • Implementing standardization and effective team training

Whether you're a ClickUp veteran feeling overwhelmed by its features, or you're considering making the switch, this episode is packed with valuable tips to ensure a successful and fruitful implementation!

If you're already using ClickUp or planning to start, take advantage of our ClickUp Team Training in our Workday Ninja community. It's 100% free to use and takes less than an hour to complete. You and your team will gain all the knowledge needed to leverage ClickUp's most helpful features and navigate the platform effortlessly.

Haven't chosen a project management system yet? Use our free Project Management System Selector Tool to get a personalized recommendation in minutes.

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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to automate your agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. If you've tried using ClickUp or you're using it now, you know that it's powerful, but it feels overwhelming and you may not be sure how to structure it. If you feel this way, then this episode is for you.

0:00:30 - (Micah): I mean, Alane, the thing with ClickUp, I don't even know where to start. I love it, but honestly, we had false starts with it. I remember two distinct times. We go, let's look at ClickUp, and then we look at ClickUp and we're like, oh my gosh, I don't know. It's complicated. Where do we even start? There's so many features. I think a lot of people feel that way, too. However, once you get into it and once you know how to use the features, and maybe more importantly, how to turn off the features that you're not using, which is also unique to ClickUp, it becomes a powerhouse for your operational systems.

0:01:17 - (Alane): Yeah. So you're not alone if you feel that way. And I remember more so than Micah, I do not like changing. It has to be a huge gain in how we're managing things for me to be okay with. Switching and clickups come a long way too. Over the past, probably, what have we maybe used it for three or four years now? I can't remember exactly when we switched over a few years ago. And it is a lot easier to use functionality where you used to have to do the commands for the bullets and numbers. And I did not like that. You no longer have to do it. Thank goodness.

0:01:55 - (Micah): Yeah, they really have done a ton of improving on it. But it is, as we said earlier, it is the more of the three between Asana, ClickUp and Monday. It is the more complicated one. It also allows for far more flexibility than anything. So maybe we could start off by talking about some of the flexibility that's out there.

0:02:18 - (Alane): Yeah, I was thinking, like, why did we change? So we were Asana and we changed. And so there's one piece that really sets it apart from the other two, and that's the ease of the way that they bubble up tasks with their hierarchy, which is just native to that system.

0:02:35 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. You can have a space, and under that space you can have folders, and under those folders you can have lists which sound like, okay, cool, doesn't everybody do that?

0:02:44 - (Alane): Right.

0:02:45 - (Micah): But the difference is you can put views on the list level, then you can put views on this on the folder level and see all the lists and all the tasks within all the lists. You can put views on the space level, you can put views on the everything level and see everything across your entire organization. So to answer the question that is very commonly asked, which is what are the overdue tasks that my team currently has, that's a hard question to ask.

0:03:15 - (Micah): That's a hard question to answer across an entire account. When it comes to tools like Asana and Monday, that's about three clicks and ClickUp.

0:03:25 - (Alane): And this could be on your, if you're a manager and you're managing your team of people and you need to just see this visibility, or if you're a business owner and you're trying to do capacity planning and you want to know resource management, and so, you know, you can look at it from department company size, depending on how big your team is. But this makes a huge difference and makes managing projects a lot easier in ClickUp.

0:03:50 - (Micah): Yeah. We went from having to go into each project inside of Asana to make sure that we were on track. It took about 3 hours a day. That's half of a project manager's day right there. We designed things correctly in ClickUp after our fall starts, got it going and it takes about ten minutes. It is unbelievably powerful and efficient. But I say all that because I also remember how frustrating it was to, I'll say I got super excited about ClickUp. Look at all this stuff that we could do.

0:04:29 - (Micah): And then I wanted to get the team into it right away. So I made the same mistake that a lot of our clients make, which is let's get a new system, let's throw everybody in it, and it's going to be great.

0:04:40 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:04:41 - (Micah): But I remember there was, there was some definite pushback. Yeah. Yeah. It was frustrating because there's all these features. One of the biggest, I would say, you know, Asana kind of does this now too, but ClickUp definitely does. It is the home screen. When you first get a user and you log into ClickUp, your home screen has like every card on it. Why?

0:05:06 - (Alane): I don't know why they do that. It's weird.

0:05:09 - (Micah): It's so overwhelming. So my first pro tip for ClickUp is go to the home screen, go to manage cards and get rid of all the AI cards, get rid of the recent, get rid of the lineup cards. I would recommend starting with either the my tasks or the assigned to me, which are just two versions of the same thing. And the calendar.

0:05:31 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:05:33 - (Micah): If you need more, add more, but start minimal and then add.

0:05:37 - (Alane): When they made that change, I just went back to exactly. I took all that stuff out and you just need to know what you need to get done today.

0:05:45 - (Micah): Yeah. And ClickUp is actually really good about automatically moving your tasks in your home screen so that you know what you need to get done today based on any way you have it set up. But they're also, I guess, really good about giving you so much flexibility. That's hard to understand what, what you should be looking at. I think that creates a lot of overwhelm in the beginning.

0:06:08 - (Alane): Yeah. And, you know, when you're, when we're talking about like your home screen, what you're looking at where ClickUp, I like what they do just natively is you have the tasks that are due today that's at the top, and then what tasks are overdue where you missed the mark and getting it done. So, you know, you need to change the date on, do you need to get it done today or does a future date, and then they still have the next, like the upcoming tasks that you have due. So as you work through your today, you can see also what you have coming up next.

0:06:39 - (Micah): Now, one thing that is confusing, when you add the calendar view to your home screen, it's showing you one day. So then there's the question of, well, how do I get an actual calendar view of all my tasks? But because of the hierarchy, there's a really easy way to do this. You can go to the everything level. You can create a calendar view. You can make that calendar view personal. And then you add a filter to just show your tasks.

0:07:09 - (Micah): That's it. Save it. And you now have a private calendar view that covers the entire account across ClickUp. That's only going to show you the tasks that you have set up.

0:07:19 - (Alane): And this maybe doesn't sound like, why would I ever use this particular feature? Because we're optimistic and what we can get done in a day, what we have for the week. And if you notice you have 40 tasks due in three days, there's absolutely no way that you can get that many done. And the calendar view gives you this visibility that when you're just looking at a list of tasks that you don't really get the, what you're trying to do at a capacity for yourself level.

0:07:49 - (Alane): And so when you can see it across a week's time, a month's time, then you can move tasks knowing, like, okay, I can get three tasks done a day. What are the three I need to get done? And you can move things to the different days. That way you have a plan for the month and it just makes it a lot easier to plan out what you're going to do.

0:08:06 - (Micah): Yeah. So it's almost like a dashboard for your workload.

0:08:10 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:08:11 - (Micah): But what if you want to do dashboards for all your client projects? Ooh, they have that too. So you can actually go in and create dashboards. Once you have the hierarchy set up correctly, you can create dashboards on, let's say I want to see everything that's going on inside of all my client projects. I want to get a project level view. I want to be able to see all the overdue tasks, what's urgent, what by priority, visualize anything that's going on.

0:08:43 - (Micah): The dashboards in ClickUp, my personal opinion, are the best among the three. They're the most powerful, the most flexible, and it is actually getting the closest to being able to allow you to manage your department, your team, your company at a higher level when you're talking about the work getting done.

0:09:03 - (Alane): Yeah. And the cool thing that what ClickUp is doing is you're not having to use another software to build out these dashboards to try to get all the visibility. If you're really using ClickUp as your project management system and everything is going into there, you're going to be able to build these dashboards right in it, and you're going to be able to make decisions based on the data of your company versus what you're feeling or you're thinking.

0:09:28 - (Micah): Absolutely. In dashboards, I would say it can get a little confusing between, well, should it be a dashboard or should it be a view? And I like to think of the views that you can put at the different levels of the hierarchy as more like reports. If I have questions that I want to answer, if I want to see tasks in certain ways, I'm viewing groups of tasks or subsets of tasks and I'm going to get a report on that. Whereas a dashboard is going to give you the visualization and you can still level, or you can still use the hierarchy levels, but you're going to get bar charts and pie charts and task lists and even chat windows you can throw on a dashboard.

0:10:10 - (Micah): Super, super flexible. So one of the ways that ClickUp really excels now all three, Asana, ClickUp and Monday, has custom fields, but ClickUp has, I believe, more custom fields than any of the other one. Custom field types, I should say. And what you can do with the custom fields so being able to then craft your views and create different aspects of your project, task or sub task, even just looking at things from a different angle, can all be done with custom fields. But one of the issues that people get into often is adding the same named custom field to different lists instead of reusing that same custom field across lists.

0:11:03 - (Micah): This can be trouble inside of Asana and Monday as well, but in ClickUp they've gotten better. But it's a particular pain point where you don't know that you're actually creating a whole bunch of different custom fields that have the same name until you start digging in and then you're like, hmm, okay, maybe we shouldn't have done that. And now how do we unwind it? So just be mindful. When you're adding custom fields, check for an existing custom field first. They make that a lot easier now.

0:11:34 - (Alane): So, Michael, maybe let's give an example of a custom field that can be reused between different lists and spaces.

0:11:43 - (Micah): Yeah, so let's say you've got a few brand of products that you're dealing with. You can create a custom field called Branda. And if you were to have marketing items or any other type of tasks that would be related, you might want to assign that task to a brand or all brands. So you would make a custom field that would list out the brands and then you could assign that task with that brand. Well, if you make a new brand custom field in every list that needs that, then you're going to have 20, 30, 40 custom fields all with the same thing. It's going to be very hard to manage.

0:12:23 - (Micah): So you would want to use that same custom field across every list.

0:12:27 - (Alane): Yeah, and I mean, I love custom fields and I think they're probably one of the most underutilized pieces when you're building out a project in any, really any of the project management systems. But in ClickUp and Micah, you're given this great use case with the reusing them. But it can be something really subtle that maybe it's your private task list and you want to just be able to see something quickly on where things are at or, you know, what is it related to?

0:12:55 - (Alane): I use custom fields even just on my travel planning. You know, I travel a lot for our company and who's traveling? You know, is it just me or is it a company thing? More people are coming and then have a great visibility into what needs to be planned for this trip. How can I delegate it to an assistant to somebody else on the team? You know, it just makes it easy for me to see really quickly. Okay. These are all the things I'm doing for traveling.

0:13:22 - (Alane): Who's coming with, or am I by myself?

0:13:24 - (Micah): Yep. And all those can be bubbled up to a dashboard as well. So if you wanted a dashboard for your travels, Alane, you could do a pie chart on how often do I travel by myself versus how often do I have somebody with me.

0:13:37 - (Alane): That'd be a new level of nerdy for me. But this whole dashboard concept that you're mentioning is why reusing custom fields across your company can be really important, because you can build a dashboard off of it and actually see how many. Are we doing custom projects or something custom in that custom field you're able to see from that dashboard.

0:14:00 - (Micah): Absolutely. Absolutely. So I want to shift gears a little bit. We've been talking about the high level, the hierarchy, managing tasks. But when it comes down to executing tasks, ClickUp has something that is built in and slightly different than the other two. Monday has statuses, and Asana has, or I should say Monday has status column, a custom field type. Same thing for Asana. You have a custom field type that you can call status and it's a dropdown, and then you can pick a status.

0:14:31 - (Micah): But what ClickUp has, our task status is built directly into the system, so you can create, essentially your workflow as task statuses, and then you work that task through these task statuses. So it's no longer just a complete or incomplete task, like it's no longer a checklist. Just by adding your workflow to the task statuses, you're already starting an operational system. But because it's built into ClickUp now, you can do so many things, like that's color coded, that's visible in all the dashboards, it's visible on your home screen, it's visible in every task of. There's even like a little pie chart percentage complete that you can set up so that it marks it more and more complete. The further you get through the task statuses through to complete, it's amazing.

0:15:22 - (Alane): And it doesn't just apply to the main task, you can apply task statuses to its subtasks. And we use this with my marketing team so that because you might be working on a task that has maybe ten subtasks to it, some of them things don't always work linearly. It could be where something needs to be invalidation, but some. Another person on the team is working on the content, another person is working on the video for it, you know, so each piece can have its own status. You can see if something's in validation, you can see if something's in progress, you can see if something is completed, all related to that one task, which is really nice to see.

0:16:04 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. It becomes super powerful. And again, it's really the first steps towards building a system. Now, when you have those task statuses, there's also perfect to trigger automation clickups. Internal automation is really, really powerful and they keep adding to it. I've been super impressed. There's a lot that you can do with it, but even when you hit the limitations or you want to start automating stuff outside of ClickUp, it's very simple to say, hey, when a task changes to status b, trigger this automation inside a ClickUp, do these things, and then trigger a webhook.

0:16:41 - (Micah): And that webhook could go to like a make.com or a zapier automation that then opens up the whole world to say, all right, when this is happening inside of ClickUp, then do this, this, and this outside of ClickUp, whether it's sending emails for status updates to clients or adding folders in Google Drive, the sky's the limit. As long as it has an API, you can get it from ClickUp outside of ClickUp and do stuff with it.

0:17:09 - (Alane): So Micah, let's talk through an example of where you're using ClickUp and you can do the automation within ClickUp itself. And I was thinking just our project management for our clients and having when it moves to a new status, new subtasks are created.

0:17:26 - (Micah): Yeah, so there's a lot of work that we do where we just don't want to do it and not have anybody look at it and then send it to the client and hope it was correct. We need to do a little QA internally. Like most people, if you're doing marketing or if you're doing ads or if you're doing anything, you want to have a second set of eyes that are going to look at it to make sure it's client ready. So we do the same thing, but we've automated a huge piece of this. So as we're working through our workflows from the task statuses, when it goes to validation in our ClickUp, when that task, main task goes to validation, it automatically triggers an automation that creates a subtask assigned to the right person who could validate this task.

0:18:12 - (Micah): They can then manage that task and that subtask in their own workload and they don't have to. We used to have to switch the parent task to the owner and then the dates and then you switch it back, and you never knew where things were at or who owned it or what was happening because we had to change so many things. Now we have the parent task, and then we have validation tasks, and it works beautifully. And all of that. There's not a project manager sitting there waiting for tasks to turn to validation. And then they create the subtask, then they assign it, then they date it, then they create the priorities, then they follow up.

0:18:46 - (Micah): All of that is built into the system automatically.

0:18:49 - (Alane): Yeah, and all of this can sound really overwhelming when Micah and I are talking about it. But this is what we do for our clients, too. Not just for ourselves, but with our company. We help clients map out what their workflow is and then where these automation pieces within the platform can happen and outside of it. So the other part, Micah, that you were talking about is these API connections or integrations that are available between platforms.

0:19:18 - (Alane): My favorite one is new client onboarding, where you, we close the deal in Pipedrive, and it automatically kicks off the new client onboarding project. And ClickUp, it creates the Dropbox folder for asset storage. And all of these things done that would take a couple of hours manually is done within five minutes.

0:19:37 - (Micah): Oh, not even five minutes. I think it runs in like 90 seconds.

0:19:41 - (Alane): Yeah, I was being over generous with the timeframe, but, yes, five minutes on.

0:19:47 - (Micah): A sleepy, bad day for the automation.

0:19:51 - (Alane): All right. And so the next thing is really setting up, turning off clickapps, simplifying the UI, making it easier so that you don't feel like you're going all over the place all the time.

0:20:04 - (Micah): Yeah. ClickUp, because it can do so much, can feel really busy in the UI. But they have a genius solution for this, and it's going in, you have different levels that you can turn stuff off on. You can turn stuff off on the entire account. You can turn stuff off at a per space level, which helps you determine, well, what should be a space when you want to turn things on and off, that's a good indicator that that should be a separate space.

0:20:34 - (Micah): But being able to turn off functionality across the app or within the spaces within ClickUp is so powerful because it could take, when you open up the task view, there's a bunch of, by default, a bunch of options. You could have time estimates, you could have time tracking, you can have relationships, you can have tagging, you can have all these things sitting up there, and you can actually turn all of those off if you don't need them, which means it's not becoming a cognitive overload for anybody viewing this UI.

0:21:07 - (Micah): And so that's one of the tricks we say in the beginning is, again, minimalize, simplify everything down, add when you need it, don't turn everything on in the beginning and then reduce when you need it because your team's not going to like you very much for about four weeks.

0:21:25 - (Alane): Yeah, and I'm going to go ahead and just plug a couple of our other little hacks here too. Is go when you are using it, turn off email notifications. You do not need an inbox notification and an email notification. And one thing that isn't necessarily in your settings, but I think is really powerful for your own wellbeing is if you don't need to be a watcher on a task, remove yourself. You don't have, if it is something you don't need to be on, you don't need to clutter your inbox, just remove yourself as a watcher and you won't continue to be updated.

0:21:59 - (Micah): That's a huge point. Excellent point. Yeah. It can get overwhelming and it can get habit forming where you're going into the ClickUp inbox and then you're marking everything clear. Because I didn't need to know that. I didn't need to know that. Okay, cool. Just take yourself off.

0:22:16 - (Alane): Yeah. And if your team needs you back in, they can always tag you in a comment and loop you right back in if you need to be in there. So it doesn't mean you're removed forever, just means right now you don't need to be a part of this discussion and it's bringing you down places that you don't need to be taking up time.

0:22:33 - (Micah): Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think it goes much like Asana, much like Monday. We've already kind of touched on this a little bit, Alane. But when you start using ClickUp and you get your team in on ClickUp, set up some of these standards, set up some of these systems, and then train your team, communicate with them.

0:22:55 - (Alane): You, you have to do training in all of them. This one is so important because every single person is going to use it differently depending on the day, they're going to use it different than the day before and train them on what? On all these pieces. And we have a basic training course that we developed because I thought, you know, when we started building these, what is the first thing that people need to know day one, when you start working in a project management system, whether they are a new employee for you and they need to know how to use it or you move to it and people are using it all different ways and you need them to okay, at the core, what do we all need to do?

0:23:33 - (Alane): And so there's three basic things that I think that everybody needs to be doing day one.

0:23:38 - (Micah): So we'll put that in the show notes the link. So take advantage. Jump in. We cover the three core things. We cover a couple bonus items in there, but you could literally invite your team to that, give them the basis and get that as the foundation to really be successful with ClickUp.

0:23:56 - (Alane): Yeah. And you can make it a part of your new employee onboarding. You can link to that with the discount code. So even your new employees are getting trained.

0:24:04 - (Micah): We do that too.

0:24:06 - (Alane): Yes. So if you feel like yes, I love everything that Mike and Alane was just saying, then shoot us a noteworthyorkdayninja.com quote s our our website and we are here to help you build your workflows. Utilize ClickUp. Make sure you're in the right project management system. This is what we love doing and why we started our company. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level.

0:24:31 - (Alane): We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:24:36 - (Micah): And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:24:41 - (Alane): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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