3 Free Ways to Automate More in ClickUp

If you're using ClickUp Automations inside your workflow, you might have come across the whole usage limit thing inside ClickUp Automations. And before we even get into how to make the most of the limit that you have, I want to just call out the fact that on ClickUp's website the way they describe usage is kind of confusing. So on the pricing page you'll see that each plan of ClickUp has a limit to how many automations you can have occur. But where it gets a little trippy is they're using the word automations here. But what they're really meaning is actions. So let me explain that. So as we go into ClickUp here, if I go into Automations, this whole thing is one automation. This is one automation we set up in ClickUp. It even says right here create automation and it creates one of them. But how ClickUp actually bills you little deceptive here is actually per action. Okay, so it's not like it's one of these, one of these being triggered is one automation usage. This because it has two different actions on the right hand side that this counts as two automation usages. So let's just do a quick test here so you can see what I'm talking about. I'm going to turn this one off. We have this one automation with two actions occurring. My usage right now in this demo account is 3 for the entire month. So in theory we should see this go up to four if it was one automation per usage. But let's just go ahead and test this out. I'm going to create a task, test, test, test, go in here, going to go back to my automations and check what happened and we can see that our usage has gone up by by two because even though it says on their sales page that they charge per automation in here on the fine print it's actions and ClickUp. This is a suggestion for you that I'll be sure to submit, but this is very misleading. So if you're someone who's trying to make the most of the actions that you have available, not automations, without upgrading your plan or buying their add on packs here, pay special attention to the three tips I'm about to share. Take tip number one is to not do what I just did. Do not create automations like this where it says task created, then change assignees and change tags. Because as you just saw, this used up two different actions in my allotment for the month. But if we get creative we can actually ensure that this takes up zero automations and the way we're going to do that is by using a form instead. So with a form we can actually apply a template and change the assignee for free. So I'm going to choose me as the assignee. I, I'm also going to then create a task template with the tag in it. So you see here my automation, all it's doing is changing the assignee and changing the tag. And what tag is it? Just the tag example. All right, so what I'm going to do instead, I'm going to go to a random area and I'm going to just create a task with example tag. Just copy that. And on this task which I'm going to create, all I'm going to do, the only thing I'm going to have added, including watchers, is the tag example. Just make sure everything's empty and then I'm going to click Save as template. What we're doing is we're saving one template with one thing in it, just the example tag. So I'm going to call this template Add example tag. Then I'm going to click Save. Now using a form we can have this template which is just adding a tag, it's not doing anything else. We can add this template automatically to every form submission. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to include example tag. Here we go. Use template. There we go. If we're using automations based on task creation and it's only one automation being used, we can replace that automation and all of the actions connected to it using a form template. You could see we could even save this to also have the assignee included. So we wouldn't even need to use this guy, it could just all be in this form template internally we would just want to create tasks using the form where rather than creating tasks on the fly. Plus it saves us two actions in our automations quota. So that is your first tip in terms of making more of your automations use forms and their included automations that you don't have to pay for. Now the second tip is related to the first. And if you ever find yourself using multiple actions in a scenario, whether you're on the paid plan where you're able to have multiple actions or you're on the free plan and wish you could apply multiple actions, using templates can be a great way to avoid having to put multiple actions together. Because rather than saying when status changes you can, you know, change the due date, change the assignee, change all this stuff, we just create a template with all of those elements included. So rather than having three unique actions, we have one action which applies a template which includes many elements. So just like I showed you before, we could create a task in here that has the example tag, that has a due date of, you know, the 22nd, that has a priority of high. Each of these things would normally have to be individual actions, but by saving them as one template, we bundle them all into one action, which is a huge cost saver because we go from three actions to one action. Now, the third and final tip I have about making the most of your automations in ClickUp is to not use them. Yeah, so ClickUp Automations are a little stingy and they can only do a certain number of things. So what I often recommend people do if they are kind of sensitive to price and they want to make sure they're getting the most bang for their buck out of automations, is to supplement ClickUp Automations with other freemium tools. So you might have heard me talk about Integromat and zapier at some point along the channel, or if not, you're going to hear it throughout this month. Both of these tools act as connection points between two tools that wouldn't normally talk to each other. So Dubsado and ClickUp sheets and ClickUp, ClickUp and HubSpot. You can connect different tools using Integromat or Zapier as the translator, if you will. It sends data back and forth. But people don't often realize you can also use these tools to automate within one tool. So for example, we could create a zap that creates a task in ClickUp when a folder is created in ClickUp, we could create an integromat scenario that says when a ClickUp folder is created, also create a ClickUp list. Rather than just using these tools as bridges to connect two totally different softwares, we can also use these tools to create actions within one tool. And the reason I'm putting these two extra tools on a video that's talking about cost savings is because both of these have a freemium option, meaning you can start for free, use a good amount of stuff, and then upgrade only if you need to. But I will just say from experience, if you have both of these accounts, or even just one of them, in addition to ClickUp Automations, you can get pretty far before you even need to pay for them. You can do a whole lot with the free accounts of all of the tools I mentioned here. ClickUp Free Plan, Super Generous Zapier and Integromat also have super generous free plans. So there is a lot you can do without having to add more cost and it avoids you having to run into those limits of what ClickUp allows you to do on the per action quota based system that they have there. So there is some fun frugality to continue our Automations theme throughout this month. If you'd like to see more about using Automations in ClickUp or outside of ClickUp with ClickUp, you know what I mean, Check out the playlist I'm going to have here because that is our whole playlist about Automations in ClickUp. It's going to have a lot of good stuff like this one here. And if you found this video helpful, please do help me out by giving this video a thumbs up and leaving a comment. It is like paying for this video because it is free. But if you do those things YouTube will show this video to more people and I would really really appreciate it it. So yeah, until next time thank you guys so much for watching and enjoy the process.