3 Workflows for Personal Productivity in ClickUp (+ What I'm Changing in 2021)

Hello. Hello. This is funny. This is the first time that's happened, but I'm sure it won't be the last. If you guys have joined me on the other livestream this morning, thanks for joining again. Today we're going to be talking about personal productivity and ClickUp. And I realized this morning we jumped into the wrong livestream. So if we're a few minutes late where you're watching this, that's why. So today, just to recap of what the story was before we realized, or I realized that I clicked on the wrong link, what we're going to be talking about today is productivity and so on. Recap of what? And we are limping. And we are. Oh, all right. So we're gonna be talking about personal productivity. And as I was trying to show on the screen here, I have a bit of a presentation for us to go through today where I've mapped out not just my personal productivity method from, you know, a method I'm currently using to process map, which is how we'd normally handle these process mapping sessions. If you've joined these before. Normally I show up on the right link and on time, it's quarantine, guys. I guess 2020 is following me into 2021. So if you normally follow these live streams, I'm usually mapping out a process that will help you in your business. And then we identify gaps in that process, we improve that process, and then we talk about how we would turn that process into a ClickUp template. Today's gonna be a little different. Not just because I'm a hot mess, apparently, but because we're talking about personal productivity. And so I thought it would be more useful to. To not just talk about what is personal productivity or what's a general flow, but instead to tell you guys how I personally manage my personal productivity in ClickUp. And not just how do I manage it right now, but how have I changed that over time? Because 2019, I managed it one way, which you're actually going to see here on the presentation. We had one way, 2020, I've kind of changed that flow. And 2021, I am changing that flow yet again. At each stage, I've actually made different YouTube videos talking about that method. But one of the funny things about YouTube as a medium is videos get picked up three months after you publish them. And so I've had people reach out to me and be like, how do you manage this, that and the other? I just watch your video here and the video that they're watching is three to six Months old. And as you'll see in this workflow, my process changes pretty often. And so I thought this would be a good way to both update those videos or kind of amend the process I talked about in those videos and also give you guys a concrete example of how exactly one can manage their productivity inside ClickUp. So thank you guys for bearing with me on our rough start today. But to get us started, I want to just give you kind of the run of the run of the show, the agenda, if you will, of what we're planning today. And I also want to ask you guys to answer some of these questions, because the first thing I want to talk about today is what is productivity? And I was talking to my husband this morning, and I was like, hey, I've got a live stream today. You know, please don't be too loud with the construction noise because we're renovating our house, which is why there's nothing behind us. And he's like, oh, okay, what's it about? I said, productivity. He's like, oh, okay, what's that? And I was like, I don't really know, because productivity is one of those words that has a whole lot of meaning. So that's where I want to start our presentation today with what is productivity? And I'd love to hear you guys chime in. What do you define this term to be? Because I think my definition is probably gonna be a little different than what you have. So here's what I currently have as my definition of productivity. The ability to focus on the best use of your time in each moment. What do you guys think of that? Is that kind of about where you're going? That way we all have a common frame of reference as we go through this presentation. Productivity is the ability to focus on the best use of your time in each moment. Feel free to drop me a comment, let me know what you think. Does that kind of line up for you guys? I'm defining best in this structure by things I value and things that I should value. That's kind of how I broke down this definition more because I think it's so helpful to have a clear kind of understanding of terms before we start digging in. Don't start Myers briggsing me on that one. Hey, go high level. Nice to see you here today. Hopefully you're all excited to talk about productivity. So do you guys kind of agree with this definition? Feel free to drop me, like, thumbs up in the comments if that's kind of where you're at as well, or if you have your own definition. I'd love to hear it because when I actually searched, because, you know, I try to do my research, guys, when I actually searched YouTube for productivity, which is not normally something I really search for, it's not a type of content I watch a lot. I saw a lot of videos like this. How to be ten times more productive. Perfectionism is destroying productivity. And you know, low lo fi chill hop music, of course. And I feel like a lot of productivity content I was consuming was around, you know, just like these little hacks and tips and tricks. And today, using this definition, the productivity workflows we're going to be talking about is more about just focus, mastering focus in a way that's important to you based on your values. And since most of you I know are business owners, it's going to be more of the values of your business or the values of what's going to be useful for you in your work. So what do you guys think? Give me a thumbs up in the kind of wherever you're watching if that's kind of lining up with your definition of productivity and if it's not, tell me why. Because I honestly, I had you think about this a little bit this morning just to make sure. So that's what is productivity. Compositional strategies. Love that definition. Okay, awesome. I was hoping I was on the right track here because I was like, why is this so hard to define? So let's just dig in to the main meat today. I'll let you guys keep chiming in with your thoughts as we go and I'm going to talk about three different productivity workflows that I've used in ClickUp and I'm going to break them down by 2019, 2020 and 2021. The 2021 one is obviously the one I'm starting to roll out here, so it's not perfect. Before I start doing that and I bias you all, would you mind leaving a comment and saying how do you decide what to do in ClickUp? Do you use priority flags? Do you use sorting or ranking? Do you use due dates? How do you decide what to do next next? I'm going to give you guys a second to let me know here because that conversation is what we're going to be talking about for the next probably 30 minutes or so on this live stream. How do you decide what to do next? And you're going to hear how I decide that throughout the whole rest of this live stream. So what do I do next? How do you decide that? Leave a comment, let me know and has that changed in ClickUp versus other tools? If you've migrated from ClickUp from maybe Trello or Asana or Monday or Notion Notion especially you have to define your own rules there. I'd love to just hear a little bit about how you triage. Is that different for your team? Curious to know. Okay, so we're going to start off in the olden days of 2019 for this workflow map. I'm going to tell you how I was managing what to do Next back in 2019 when using ClickUp. I know it's crazy that that's two years ago. Well, two calendar years ago, the period of 2019 for me. I call the guilt capitalism version of my task management and here's how it went and I think this is probably going to hit home for some of you as you write in how you manage your tasks. This is how I see a lot of other new ClickUp users manage their tasks. When it came to task creation, I started by creating my tasks directly in a list based on category. So for example, I might have a list called Marketing, a list called Biz Dev, a list called Operations, Fulfillment Clients. And every time I had an idea for a task I should do, it went in there. Whether it was a project based task that had to be done by a deadline or if it was like a dream task that one day I would redo my website, it all went in to a list. And it sounds like some of you guys are the same way we've got here. You're talking about inbox mostly tasks based on due dates. Exactly. Yep, Compass, we've got due dates, but that wasn't realistic. Oh, okay. You're foreshadowing some of what we're going to talk about today, Damian. We've got filtered view hiding tasks that are unavailable to me. Ooh, this is kind of what I was doing in 2020 Damian, so you might find that interesting. So in 2019 I was less savvy than most of you guys in the comments. I was pretty much just putting everything in a task list. And the way I was filtering, much like what you're talking about here with a filtered view, I was filtering based on a status of idea. And actually many of you guys know this strategy because I still get a lot of comments on this old video from and actually this is May 2020, so be fair. I did switch this since this time but early 2020 year I released this video talking about ideas versus tasks. And the way in this video I was sorting my ideas versus tasks is by Having a status called idea. And what's funny is since the time of recording this video to publishing it, so probably was spring 2020, I actually changed this process internally. But. But we had the status of Idea, then to do, then in progress, then closed, or maybe some more statuses in between. And that's how I was triaging things. I pretty much just did it when I could think to do it. Every task by the time it was created had a due date and assignee, and it started in the idea status most of the time. And I'll show you why that didn't quite work when it came to daily action. Taking charge, doing the tasks, not just capturing them. Here's kind of what my day looked like. Maybe this will relate to some of you stress about emails and missed phone calls. Because at the time I was still getting a lot of phone calls. Log into ClickUp, click through lists until I found something I felt like working on. This is so embarrassing to read out, but we're just gonna. We're just gonna roll with it. Oh, I'm sorry. I make this a little bigger for you. So start out with stressing about emails, logging into ClickUp, clicking through lists in ClickUp until I found something I wanted to work on. And then it got a little crazy. I would start doing some tasks and if I got distracted, I would click through more tasks to pick something else I wanted to work on. If I felt particularly ambitious that day, I would check the inbox. There was usually a lot of things overdue in that inbox because I wasn't using due dates properly. Usually then I'd panic and delay those due dates. If I saw there was too many piling up, I would just delete tasks because they seem silly now or push them down the line. Just kicking the can down and down and down the road because I didn't. The due dates weren't really due dates. They were like, oh, Layla, you'll totally finish all of this by the end of the week. And then two weeks later, those tasks are still sitting there with due dates of three weeks ago, two weeks ago. And this was kind of a cycle I was in on task management. Is this anyone else? Let me know. I was like, mario, you have a little. You can relate to this. Barbie can relate to this as well. It's just. I just kept. I was playing a game of kick the can with myself in ClickUp. And as an undercurrent to all of this, which kind of ties into personal productivity, I was distracted constantly by checking email social and I didn't even put it on here. Phone ClickUp notifications I had a lot of channels to check and I was constantly, constantly checking them because I was just very, I was just very aware of all of the things that I could need to do. And I thought being more aware of was the thing that would make me more productive. Because remember, my definition up here though, is the ability to focus on the best use of your time in each moment. And reading these side by side, there's obviously a disconnect here, right? Knowing a lot of things are happening is like the complete opposite of being able to focus on the best use of your time in a given moment. And no offense to those of you who email me or phone call me, email is never the best use of someone's time or very rarely, right? Answering email is not something I value doing and I don't even think it's something I should really value doing. It's not the highest use of my time and my existence. And so having that as the constant undercurrent of my day of reacting, it just wasn't really effective. So looking here at 2019 and I just kind of retro or in hindsight mark some of these red and yellow or red and orange. I started marking things that aren't great and I started thinking about how I could make them better in 2020. Before I flip to that, I want to go to one other piece which doesn't even exist here and should definitely be read. Guiding Goals is like the third piece of personal productivity and ClickUp and this is kind of deciding what is the big picture values that determine what's the best use of your time. Right? The two parts of productivity, focusing on the best use of your time. Well, this guiding goals, these are the things that are supposed to tell me what's the best use of my time. And I put here because I really don't know what it was, but it's probably just more so panic and putting out fires and feeling overwhelmed and never feeling like I was doing enough. That's pretty much my guiding goal. And that's red because that is not a sustainable way to run a business. Anyone else, anyone else run their business based on just panic, Especially client service folks, if anyone's in there. In 2019, I was doing a whole lot of client services, exclusively client services, which is funny compared to now, but it was just lots, lots of calls and needs and other people's putting other people's businesses before my own. I was spending no time on my own business. It was completely reactive. So leave a note or leave a comment, give me an emoji in the response, like just give a thumbs up if that sounds like something that you faced with, that you were putting other clients or putting your clients businesses before your own and you were kind of putting your own needs or business on the backseat. Want to admit it? You don't have to, but. All right, let's, let's move us forward here. I'm going to talk about 2020, which the theme was for me, the good with the boring. And I'll unpack how my workflow changed in 2020. So just like last time, we're going to break this down into three sections. Task creation, doing the tasks, and then the guiding principles, which by the time 2020 came around, I'd really focused on ClickUp at this point in time for my business. And so I've been able to give myself more brain space to really think might click up. And so you'll see this, fortunately, is a much nicer workflow. So first of all, task creation, how it started is once again an idea for a task, right? Oh, I should do that. Whether it's something that actually needed to be done or like a someday thing. Once the task was created, it went into the idea list, which, I'm sorry, my face is so big again, let me zoom in there. So here we are and we've got the idea list. Now, this has also been featured on the YouTube channel of having an idea triage or an idea sorting area. My rules of thumb for this list were no due date and an assignee only if that idea needed to be done by that person. If an idea was just something anyone could do, no assignee was needed. This is kind of what it looked like. You can see I used a custom field for marketing or for marketing for each department. And then I used two different rating custom fields to sort this. And actually, in hindsight, I didn't realize how close impact and ease are to the two axes that you use to devise sprint points. I didn't realize how close I'd gotten to that. But this was the main way I was using to triage things. I had priority as the main overriding variable to determine the sorting order to break the ties. From there, I had impact, and to break the ties in impact, I had ease. So those are kind of the three things I was going for in that order. And it changed a little bit over time, but that's pretty much how it went. If it was a super piece of cake, it had three on the ease. If it's super high impact. It a lot of brain explosions. And that's pretty much how I was doing my sorting there. Once an idea was triaged, sorted, it moved to a task list when I defined a due date. And the list it went to was mostly either. Excuse me one second as I choke here. I think I need a drink of water. I'm going to just have a quick sip. Let me know how you guys do your idea triage. Does anyone have an idea list or are you guys still using statuses? Because you can see here how I kind of have this structured a little bit different than what you might have normally. Okay, sorry, this is a tough morning. So from the idea area, it went to either routine or improvements list. And you guys know I'm in favor of a very simple vertical hierarchy in ClickUp that includes your spaces, your folders and your lists. And I prefer to have more complication in the horizontal hierarchy. It just found that it scales better. Doesn't really matter how you start. Just to be clear, if you're starting out in ClickUp, doesn't matter. Just get stuff in there. But as you're trying to roll your ClickUp out to your team, as you're looking to go from one person using it to 10 people using it to a hundred people using it, using more horizontal hierarchy is definitely the way I found it's the way to go to make the system work at scale. So I had these two simple lists of routine tasks and improvement tasks. And when an idea was like, yep, let's go, I moved it onto that, that list. Now, even as I'm describing it here, you can see a problem in this process which is how do I know when the idea should go onto the task list? This, this is a problem. And actually let's just mark that red so that way we can. Or even orange so we can call that back later. Now, once it moved on to that new task list, I would add a due date and an assignee. Basically, this is where I really declared that the task was indeed a task and I set a due date that was actually the date I needed that task done by not just this aspirational date like I was doing back in 2019. By setting the date later in the process, I was able to filter out bad ideas or at least non essential ideas and be a little bit more realistic. Because by the time I set the due date, in theory, my due date should be within a few weeks. I should not be setting due dates unless it's a recurring routine like filing taxes or so on I should not be sending due dates. Super far out. It should be something I'm about to start working on if I'm adding a due date in this system, give or take. We'll show you how well that worked here in the Daily Action. So when it came to my day in ClickUp, then with this workflow I would log into ClickUp and I now by 2020 I was doing more of a morning check, a morning routine. I was doing time theming inside my ClickUp account, which meant not really inside at that point, but I was using a calendar, a Google Calendar and I had time blocks. And rather than having time blocks for specific tasks, I was using time blocks for categories of tasks. And I actually talk a lot about this in this video. So you can actually see the calendar in the background of that thumbnail. But there you go. I had different blocks on my calendar and that's what told me where I should focus my day. And one of the main blocks, the first blocks in my day was kind of my morning routine and my morning checks and, and this included email slack and ClickUp notifications. And this was my attempt to try to segment my focus to these kinds of reactive responses so that way I would not be checking them all day. Unfortunately, as you can see here, that didn't quite work. Yeah, constantly checking Slack continued to happen even in 2020, especially as clicking up our community grew. Thank you guys who are ClickUp members who are here. I'm in Slack a lot, you guys know that and I want to always be in Slack. But checking Slack constantly is not an effective use of my brain and my willpower. So besides checking Slack in the background the whole day after I just did my morning routine, I would go to my Focus view and my Focus view and actually have a screenshot of this. Excuse me, it's a little bit further down on the live stream. I put that picture, bring this up so that way we can all look at it. If anyone's wondering what I am live streaming with besides streamyard, obviously this is whimsical and it is just. It's won me over. Sorry mural. It's won me over. After that I would go to my Focus view and this is a favorited view which is basically an inbox. It's a due date based filtered view like I think Damien you talked about earlier on this filters all the tasks everywhere, personal, private, everything and pulls it all into one spot called Focus that shows me everything by due date. Now I personally have things collapse that if they're more than two days Out. I don't see them. They're just kind of. It's a collapse section in ClickUp. If there were any tasks in my focus area, because remember, I'm only putting due dates when something actually has a due date. So there may be days where I don't have any routine or improvement tasks scheduled. If there are no tasks, I'll move on to the next step and I'll look for the time themes that I have on the calendar that day. So every day I had different blocks of time organized. You can see again in the background here, this little yellow blurry thing is like a clicking up time block. And below that is a team management time block, and so on and so forth. If it was Tuesday and I had extra time, I'd be like, all right, it's time to record content. Because that's what I would do on Tuesdays. And based on the calendar time theme, I would click on the color that coordinated. So here you can see some of the colors. If I saw a yellow thing on the calendar, I would click on this yellow favorited view and it would take me to all of the tasks that I do when I'm wearing that hat. In my business, that's basically how I was time thinking buy role. My content creator hat was one, My CEO hat was blue. My recording. Sorry. I guess content creating was actually red. Yellow was existing content. So like content maintenance, that was yellow. Community collaboration, that was yellow and so on. And so I had a color per hat I was wearing and I had a view for each of those colors. Taking a break here. Does that make sense? Any questions here about this? I know I don't have ClickUp actually up here just because I feel like it would be too many moving parts. But what do you guys think about this? Does anyone use something similar? Here is the focus favorite in all spaces area. Yes. So focus to make it work. It's at everything. And I have it actually what I have it have has it have. My goodness. Actually, when I am setting up that view, I have it so that way it's pulling in tasks from everywhere that are assigned to me because I'm pretty diligent about assigning things. But I have it filtering locations so that it only shows the actual spaces where I have tasks and it does not show me any tasks that are in like my sandbox area because I have like a space that's just for experimenting and things like that. But it is at everything level and it is a personal view. Actually, if you watch this video here, I know I went through it pretty quickly. In that video, you'll see me actually talk through each of these favorites and how I set them up. But these are personal focus is actually one I've considered making a public view just because I feel like the rest of my team would probably appreciate it too. That's actually part of what inspired this video. But for now it is just a personal view. So that is that. All right, so this is making sense. It sounds like you can give me like a yes if that's making sense to you guys. Sounds like it is. So once I click on that favorite view, it takes me to that area and I look at that list of tasks. Because with these areas like existing content, my business, these tasks generally have due dates and the dates are the dates I want to finish the thing. But things like content or things like my business tasks, these kinds of tasks don't have due dates that are I need to go live. Like right now this is a content task that has a due date that is a real due date. So at 12pm Eastern I need to be live on camera. And so this is a date based task. That is truly a date based task. But most of my content tasks are a little bit more loosey goosey. If you watch my workflow mapping video for my YouTube process, you'll see that I kind of tend to batch things and I go through kind of spurts of content creation. I try to do a bunch of content creation one day, I'll do a bunch of editing the next day. And it's not like I need to have all the editing done by Wednesday. I just need to make sure that at the end of the month I've got all my videos scheduled and published on time. So it's a little bit harder to set due dates for these types of things. And that's where having this view, which is just kind of like a pile that I go to based on my time themed time time comes in handy. So when I go into this view, say existing content or let's just pretend I'm going into new content, I'm going to look at my list of all my new content I could create and pick which task, which piece of content. For this example I'm going to work on today. If it's on the my business side, I might look at my list of business improvements which could be things like, you know, fix the broken link on the website. It could be start affiliate program for clicking up. It could be, you know, change the COVID image on the Facebook group because it's got a Typo in it. Thank you whoever told me about that. It could be those kinds of tasks. I'm going to look at that list and pick whatever tasks I feel like doing from that list of tasks that have due dates that aren't, you know, really set in stone. They're more like, yes, please do this during this period of time, unfortunately, because I am who I am and I tend to be. I'm quite focused, but I want to do a lot of things at the same time. I take on a lot. This led to an unhelpful cycle of work for me at least. And this is why I call this. I have a nickname for it again, the good with the boring. This stuff was fun for me. The stuff that was in my favorites. Once I got past the focus area, which was usually more so routines, this was a fun area of the day. But because there was no set limits, I found myself doing a lot, a lot, a lot. And this whole process of shopping through for extra ideas. Sometimes I'd even do that where I'd be picking through my favorite view to pick, oh, what video do I want to work on today? And all of a sudden I'd start shopping through new ideas that I didn't yet vet because I was just feeling like I could do anything I want in not a good way. So this cycle was not the most helpful. I hope this makes sense. And so this is an area when it came to 2021 and kind of planning how I'm going to be changing my ClickUp, this cycle for me was not great. I think if I had just employees giving this method to them, this process, I think it would probably work better. But as a business owner who's always thinking of ideas, this just felt a little bit too free for me. I think I need more separation between decision making and doing. Whereas right now with this particular task in particular, I was both deciding to do something and doing something in the same sitting, which I'd much rather see separated because I just know that works better for me to stay focused again on the thing that's most important is at that moment in time. So, okay, just seeding some comments here. This is awesome. Oh, I'm so glad this board is helping you. It was fun to make this this morning. Yeah. Okay, we've got idealist and assigned channel. Awesome. Mario, seems like you're on the same page. Absolutely. Okay, so let's go down to the last section of this which is guiding direction. Now, if you guys are joining us a bit late, I'm just going to Recap that there are three, which you won't be able to see. I know they're too blurry. Three sections to each of these productivity methods. Task creation, daily action, and kind of finding direction. I'm sure people have better, more sexy terms for this, but these are the three that I'm using to think about it and what makes sense to me. So in 2020, how I handled my guiding direction started off with a group called what Works. If you guys don't know what Works or if you're a member of what Works, feel free to connect with me on there. Let's talk. What Works I actually have down here. It's a online community. It's online networking community run by a woman locally here. But it's a. It's just an awesome online community, private forum on mighty networks for businesses who are trying to figure out what works. And I was participating in their forum mastermind, and part of that was quarterly planning sessions. And I use that as the way to kind of have outside accountability for triaging my tasks. And so when I had my recurring quarterly planning tasks come up, I kind of just paired it, which I can just draw a line between these here. I just paired it with the what Works event. So that way, when what Works had their event, I was like, all right, this is the time to do my planning. And that worked out really, really well. Once I finished their quarterly planning prompts, which was kind of a guided exercise to help you figure out what you should work on in the next quarter. Super, super helpful. Thank you, Tara and everyone for doing that. I moved on to actually implementing some of that plans, kind of finalizing and formalizing the plans out of just a worksheet and a scratch pad. Or for me, it was a lot of times, like handwriting digitally, that kind of stuff. I would transfer it into a ClickUp dashboard and also like my calendar, which is where these holiday plans came in. And as any. Have any of you guys watched this video here? Example ClickUp dashboards, if you have, let me know. This video actually has the dashboard method that I was using for goals in it. I'm trying to think four months ago. So, yeah, this was going to be summer or fall of 2020. And it kind of shows how exactly I did that because ClickUp's goals feature, it just. It was and is not great. Um, so that's kind of how I ended up building them out in a dashboard that we would then look at every single team meeting. Cause I really wanted even. Cause we have a super small team. I still want Everyone besides me to be aligned on what the goals are for the organization. Because I'm not the only one creating tasks. Like, I'm not the only one going through this process. And if you're using this productivity method for your entire team, this best needs to be defined by everybody who is trying to pick what task to work on. And so I wanted to make sure that the goals of the business were explicit, clear, and in front of everybody's noses, so that way they could decide without having to ask me, hey, what should I work on next? Hey, is it a good use of time to edit those old blog posts, or should I xyz? So, anyway, so I created that ClickUp dashboard and I would also make holiday plans, which were usually like blocking off my calendar for a vacation, you know, for all the travel we got to do this year, or to just take time off. And here's kind of how those two ended up working out. And the lines are dotted because it was a very meandering path. Usually after making my holiday plans in the true spirit of American work, I rarely took the holiday. I partially blame Covid, mostly just blame myself. And when I had that ClickUp dashboard, it was great. I kept that up to date pretty regularly. It was very, very helpful. And it's still probably what I would recommend to teams who have a simpler planning process. But after that, I would need to kind of clean up my ClickUp to line it up with that dashboard, because it wasn't an automatic dashboard. If you watch this video again here, the dashboard I was creating was basically a check. So it was creating a text checklist, which was mentioning tasks that I wanted to accomplish in a period. And. And so administering all that and keeping track of everything was a manual process. And I would just kind of need this recurring task here of just cleaning up ClickUp. Whenever it got too messy, it was very reactive. Again, one of the themes you're going to see here is whenever there's reactive tasks, those are the ones I'm trying to get rid of because, you know, reacting, you lose that sense of control. And one of the big things I tried to do and try to help others do is take back control of their business. And if we're stuck in this reactive state, we can't do that. So 2021, let's just dive in to the future of beyond 2020. This is going to what I'm going to call the year of selective doing. For my system that is partially aspirational because I haven't fully built it out. I'm Building it out this month with Cooking up members. You guys are going to see me build this out. But yeah, I'm going to tell you some of the differences before I go. Is there any questions about the flow that I've had so far? Have any of you guys kind of tackled similar challenges? I saw that. There was a few other comments that came in here. So it looks like Marco is managing most of his priorities by goals, projects, priority and calendar. That's a lot of things, but I see how that would kind of give you that kind of sense of structure as you go through it. Anyone else, if this is kind of like connecting for you, if you have questions, just let me know. We're going to keep going through here and we're going to talk about 2021, a way to manage your tasks and be productive. So here's the flow that's going on right now. Task creation, idea for task, just like it is now because that was not an area that needed a lot of help. Then we've got categorized inbox list sorting. So this is the same thing that I talked about before of having that triage list, this guy and a guy back here. Same thing, except I'm going to be bringing it into the 2020 century. That doesn't really make sense, but I'm bringing it into 2021 with a little bit of a refresh by using the new ClickUp relationships feature to relate a task back to an okr or a goal or an objective key result that I have for the business. And that's going to make more sense when we get down to the actual kind of goal setting stuff at the bottom. So I've changed that method just a little bit, but pretty much keeping that exactly the same. I talked about that here with adding the relationship and I also want to start adding a measure of capacity. I had a conversation this morning rather with a clicking up member talking about managing capacity and projecting workloads. It's a really big thing in ClickUp. It's a really challenging thing. One of the things we were talking about is that there's a few common methods to measure and quantify workload in ClickUp. The most common one is time. The other ones are number of tasks and the other ones are things like points or custom field that basically tell you points I'm going to be using. I've been trying a few different ones here time, but I'm trying to stick to points this year and I'm going to try to start quantifying capacity in that way. So this is going to be a new part of the task creation and idea vetting process is to really quantify the workload it would create if I did indeed make it a task in terms of daily action. Log into ClickUp Morning checks, Action View tasks. So this is kind of the new version of Focus that I'm going to be creating here. So you guys saw if you joined a little late, we've got this guy that I'll bring over here for Focus. I'm going to stick with my favorite of use because I still think that is one of the biggest changes I made in my ClickUp workspace is using more and more favorited views. Just huge, hugely helpful. And I'm going to be kind of upgrading this to give me two main areas to focus. So I'm not switching between quite so many hats. The first one is going to be Action View, which is going to be kind of like what Focus is right now, where it's going to show me all of the tasks that I need to do. It needs to expend energy but but doesn't need to expend brain power. And this is kind of a divide I'm going to be making in 2021. Cause I found that despite all the different hats I wear, there really are just two categories. Tasks I can do when I'm tired and I really don't want to do, but I should do. And tasks that I need to be on to do. Like these kinds of live streams, barely. I'm not super on right now, but I need to be on to do. It's my zone of genius. It's, you know, focus work, deep work as you'd call it. And so this is my non deep work. This check Action View and this will be all the tasks, including our routines, which is the vast majority of the TAs that the team has. Hopefully not the vast majority of tasks I do. And that's where I'm going to start my day. If there's any tasks there, do them just like I have now. I'm going to build an afternoon break into my workflow in ClickUp. I don't know that I'll need a ClickUp task for this, but this is just going to be a modification of the time blocking. So rather than seeing a bunch of time themes, I'm going to be using really just three types of blocks on my ClickUp calendar or on my Google Calendar. It'll be Action Work, breaks and Deep work. That's it. And I think that simplification is going to help me stay A little bit more focused here as we go recharging and then the flow view. So this is going to be that deep work that we talked about here rather than going through that cycle that we talked about before, where I would go into this list, which I really enjoyed not having, you know, necessarily meeting due dates on. I could just go into that list and pick something. I wanted to separate the decision from the doing. And that's where this modification came in, where I'm going to go into the flow view and I'm going to pick the tasks I assigned yesterday. It's a huge difference. I'm going to pick the tasks that I assigned to myself yesterday and then when I'm done. Done. That I can pat myself on the back. You did it. And assign the tasks that I want to do tomorrow that way. My hope is it'll keep me from feeling like I need to just keep doing and instead allow me to kind of, kind of plan for my future self how much I need to do in a day. So, so that way I'm not pushing myself too hard. And I think having the separation of the decision being made on Wednesday for what I'm going to happen Thursday will avoid me being there on Thursday and thinking, no, I can finish one more thing. I can finish five more things. Sure, why not? I don't want that. And so I think having this separation will help have things going on here. So yeah, that's a huge, huge, small change to the workflow here. It doesn't actually change the ClickUp structure, but it does change the workflow. I also have then evening checks, so you'll see having more checks for the social media with specific social media check kind of assigned it each time we have going on there. And in case anyone's curious, one of these action views, one of my routine tasks is actually responding to YouTube going on Reddit, different things that I don't want to just always have open Facebook, honestly is one of them. I need to create a task for myself to do them. So that way I say until that task comes due, I don't need to log on there. Like I don't need to go into Reddit. I hang out because there's not that many posts yet. If you guys want to hang out in the ClickUp Reddit, go in there because there's not too many people yet. But those kinds of tasks that many people treat as you know, they treat them like emails. I'm trying not to. And I put them in my routine tasks area which end up in this action view. So another big change. And even if we just look at these side by side, you'll see kind of the density change back in 2019. And I know this is blurry, but that's intentional. All of my energy, all of the tasks, the most complex steps were here in the doing phase, in the middle. As we moved into 2020, it increasingly shifted downward where the more complex workflows were. In the doing, yes, but also in the planning. And here in 2020 or 2021, it's shifted even more down, where the idea creation is still simple and quick, which is what we want, right? We want to get things out of our head very quickly, which is why this workflow, I know you can't see it, but it's very simple. The doing action is now pretty much the same length, but there's more and more steps in the planning because that is how I can decide what I should work on. And I think one thing that I found for myself is that I'm really good at doing things, but am I really good at doing the right things? Only when I take the time to plan. And so that's why I've beefed up this section here. If you're someone who's really good at planning, but then you procrastinate doing, you're probably going to want to beef up this section here. And if you're someone who tends to just put tasks into your click account and you don't actually. They're not actually tasks, they've just become a lot of digital clutter, then maybe you want to beef up this process here. I built this around my weakness, so do not treat this as gospel. Not that you would, but, you know, just warning. So let me know if this makes sense to you guys. Where do you think your weak, weakest area is? I'm curious. This would be interesting to know. Is it, is it the idea creation? Like knowing what's a good idea? Is it, is it doing the thing or is it deciding what's the right thing to do? I actually want to type that. Let me know, guys, in the comments here, is it doing, deciding, or ideating? What are we sorting? Idea triage? What do we want to call that? I'd love to hear it. Like, I'm wondering if the audience, like, because you guys are watching this, if you're wired the same way as I am, or if you guys are totally opposite and that's why this is like a yin and yang relationship here. Let me know which your. Which is your hardest part. Okay. Yeah, it's A difficult puzzle for everybody. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about how I'm doing my deciding how I'm deciding my direction in 2021 and how that's changed. The first thing is quarterly planning routine task outside of what works. At this point in time, I am just kind of deciding what tasks I want to do each quarter with my own workflow. And so that was a big change from what I was doing before where I was able to externalize some of that burden by being a part of the what Works forum, which was amazing. But moving forward, I want to have a little bit more autonomy over that. So a quarterly planning routine task is something that I have in my workspace and now I'm going to be doing it on my own versus with what works. Just to see some of the responses that came in from where your hardest part is. Looks like compass, it's mine is still deciding, deciding what's the right thing to do. Mario's capturing and prioritizing. Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of like that idea side of things. Just building out this process above. I feel like I've moved. They've each been hard for me at different points in time. And it moved for me from ideas. Once I got that sorting thing down, I really moved into the guiding direction being the big weakness. Weakness is putting a lot of data from plan to tasks. Yeah. Or do you mean like too much data or too little data? Because I think some of you guys watching are probably. You have ideas where it just says, you know, call John. And you're like, which John? I know 10, but others of you. I know there's perfectionists among us here. I know many of you very well. And you tend to over plan. Right. Like this idea stuff. Nothing even becomes a task until you spend an hour planning out each and every step. Or on the flip side for maybe the planning side, down here you start procrastina planning where you start planning out every single thing you're going to do over the next year. And one week in you realize, oh yeah, I don't want to do that anymore because things changed. And waterfall planning, turns out it doesn't work for a one person team. So I'd love to hear both from you here if you want to respond and tell me a little bit more what you mean or if others kind of relate to that of kind of too much, too little data. That's, that's a really tough one to crack. So for me here on the planning side of things, what happens during my quarterly planning routine tasks because every time I'm mentioning one of these routine tasks, just so you guys know, this is a ClickUp task template that I have either applying manually or just a recurring task with a framework inside the task description inside this I have already started this which is amazing feeling two key parts to this quarterly planning routine task. Besides just kind of some self exploration, some questions, some Augustus Bradley style stuff, I'm also doing this. I'm determining what time is not available before I decide what I want to do. And this is a big switch for me. Not necessarily ClickUp related, but I want to share it here because I think it's helpful. It's related no matter who you are or what role you have or what work you do, setting aside what time you don't have available before you put in the time that you do want to spend on something. So I blocked off as part of this quarterly planning what day is my business Process driven is closed. Just we're simply not going to be open on this holiday. We're not going to be open for this day. Aside that stuff. And then as an introvert I set one no human. You guys have heard me talk about this on the channel before. A no human day. Every week I need is a non negotiable to have a day where I do not talk to any humans including my team unless it's typed they put up with me. Thankfully having that locked out on the week is essential then two unplugged days a month. This is something that I have Learned from other YouTubers who have talked about this idea and I wish I could remember his name. Matt Dev. I'm going to butcher it, but basically two ideas where you just kind of two days where you go off and you do nothing. No electronics, no you know, no for me, no ClickUp. Just being completely unplugged for two days to just recharge. This could be treated as a vacation, but I just. I want it to be more of a veg out kind of vacation. And that is the complete opposite of this day. Because this day or these two days are I'm honestly just so excited. I've been dreaming about doing this ever since I started a business, but it never felt like I could. And then I realized that something is only possible if you just tell yourself it is. And so I realized, huh, I can totally make this happen. Starting this year I'm going to be taking two CEO days every quarter. And I don't live a glamorous life here, but I'm going to be Taking two days every single quarter to only work on the vision side of my business. I recognize that's one of the weaknesses of the business. I'm so operational, go figure that it's hard for me sometimes to take a step back up and look higher. Which is why I always think my dream role is going to be coming the, you know, the number two at a startup one day. Because I'm just not as strong at the number one role of visioning and seeing the future. I need to set aside time to do that. And so this idea, it might be going off to a cabin once Covid ends and we can actually do anything here in America. Or it might just be a staycation where I'm locked up in tunnel vision on a whiteboard, just working every single part of the day on just strategy. So it's kind of a no human day in some ways because I am a solo business owner. But I'm really excited for that. So that's part of my quarterly planning here. Set objective and key results. This is the more traditional goal planning that happens here. After I ask myself the deep questions, I reflect all this other stuff. I'm going to be setting my objectives and key results. And honestly I should probably put a line between these here. No, not that much. Okay, that's too excited. Let's go there. There we go. Because really those two do feed into each other the objective and key results. I'm now going to be putting into ClickUp as tasks. Thank you ClickUp. As you guys probably saw in my level up video, they now are allowing us to create tasks as things that aren't tasks. I shouldn't say now because they're not quite released yet, but you can make do with it currently because we have relational databases in ClickUp basically, you know, they're kind of, they're not notion but I'm creating tasks that are objectives, subtasks that are key results and I'm using those with a relationship field to relate my tasks back to the goals. And I wish I sorry guys, I didn't put a visual in here but basically my task is, you know, create website. There's a column that says what objective is this related to? And I will use that relationship column to click out and connect that task back to one of these OKRs that you see here. So I hope that makes sense. I'm going to be doing a video on this as soon as I have it built out right now. But I'm not in love with it yet. As soon as I feel really happy with it you're going to see this come out probably. I'm clicking up. You're going to see this later this month. People who aren't in clicking up. You'll probably see it maybe next month on the YouTube channel. It's kind of the plan right now. So yes. So set those objectives and those key results that I'm looking for. And at the same time I'm going to have a scheduled ClickUp cleanup routine. I kind of developed one by accident because I do clean up both my and clients clickups so often that I was like I should make this a routine task. That's part of the quarterly planning. I have a template for okr so that way I'm not filling them out from scratch. Go figure. And then I'm going to review all this stuff with the Mastermind. I'm a part of this ClickUp cleanup routine. I just want to share in case any of you guys are interested in it. This is the idea of checking for things in ClickUp that do not. We're Marie Kondoing our ClickUp. We're basically deleting things that aren't helpful, that aren't true, that aren't getting us further to where we want to go. Justin Smith in one of the recent videos, the collaboration video where it talked about pro tips from other ClickUp consultants, Justin talked about how the best way to get people to not do what you say you want them to do is to give them a task, some of which or give them a task list where some of the tasks on that list are not important and they know it. That's a great way to get people to not trust your system. And I thought it was just such a great point. And that's one of the major things that I want to have in my cleanup is getting rid of tasks that do not serve and just kind of providing a little bit of maintenance. There are certain things that you want to check for in your ClickUp account, like overdue tasks, unclear notifications, SOPs that are out of date. I want to just make this a routine in my business and then also clicking up people. If you are a member of clicking up. I want to start bringing this into the whole membership and guide us all through it. Much like what works made my life easier by guiding me through quarterly planning. I'm hoping to plan or I'm hoping to guide you guys through ClickUp cleanup because I've developed a few systems that I think really work for this and if you guys are interested in that, actually leave it in the comments. Because I'm still. It's like on a coming soon basis right now. But if you would be interested in having kind of a guide or prompt of how to clean up your ClickUp, how to maintain it every quarter, that doesn't take very long, I promise. Let me know in the comments here. Okay. So after that, I take all this stuff outside my brain and I look to my mastermind group to give me feedback. Tell me when I'm not, you know, for me specifically, it's. I'm not thinking big enough. That's usually what they're telling me. I'm part of two groups, so that's great. I get two different perspectives on feedback there. And then I bring it to my team and I review it with them. This usually isn't quite as collaborative just because I don't have full time employees. So it's more. So like, here's the plan. Any thoughts or anything I missed? It's usually not super in depth. It's part of our team meetings that we review anyway. So there you go. There's that one. And that is my quarterly planning process coming in 2021. I actually do almost all of this already except for the cleanup, which is a little bit more informal. Yeah. So that's kind of that piece ready to go on to the next stage here. And again, let me know if you'd be interested in getting kind of a guide on ClickUp cleanup. Or do you. Do you even like need to clean up your ClickUp? Is it just mine that gets messy? Maybe it's just mine. Could be just mine. I don't know. I do, I do a lot of stuff. Experimentation. Maybe things just break in mind more than others. Okay. I also want to add a second tier of review here because for those of you joining us late, we're looking at a bunch of different phases here. Each of these productivity systems have three phases of task creation, daily action, and guiding principles or guiding direction. And in all the other ones, I've just been thinking about quarters at a time. And in this 2021 version, I've added a daily review. Basically in this task here, I can just make yellow, actually, let's make it a cool color blue. And I've also added a quarterly planning here. Now I want to take it one step further. And I also want to do every other week, which I refuse to use the word bi weekly because for those of you, especially those of you who aren't native English speakers, man, bi weekly is a dumb word. So every other week planning routine tasks, just look up the definition of biweekly. Come on. It's ah, so bad. Um, so every other week planning routine is another piece I want to add into the puzzle here. This is going to be routine recurring task in ClickUp, just like all the other ones I have here. The first piece of this process is the most important. I think it's one that used to be a part of my idea triage in 2020. I hope I don't mess up these years. And in 2021 I want to add it into the bi weekly. Darn. I use the word every other week planning routine. So that way it's not quite as clear close to me actually doing the task. I'm going to separate it a little bit more, give myself more space. So this one is going to be reviewing capacity. We have routine tasks in my business and my hope is that over time, hopefully by the end of this quarter, every routine task is not assigned to me. That is, that is my objective for this year is every single time we create a routine, it gets off of my plate. That's the end goal. But I want to get that end closer than further away. So after routines, which is most of my team's time and some of my time right now, I want to see what capacity we have left. And like I talked about in the last year, really, time point or number of tasks are the main ways to quantify workload in ClickUp. You could do some more creative things, but that's really it. Number of tasks, amount of time, endpoint based. I'm going to try point based. I've been using time estimates in the past and I'm not really happy with that. Mainly because one hour of doing is not the same as one hour of like deep work. Those are totally different outputs, but they both take an hour. And I could probably push myself to do that one hour of boring work faster, but I really can't force that kind of deep work. So I'm going to start using a modified version of kind of story points and I'm going to be trying that in my workspace this year so I can actually cross that off. And I'm going to be reviewing the capacity I have after routines for myself and my team to get things done. This will have to change every time we hire somebody new, but for the team as it is, we're pretty soon state steady, we're pretty stable. So I should be able to get a good sense of our velocity from using points after a few weeks. So that's the, the hope here. So yeah, one task Here that is part of the process. The goal that I was just talking about is that every time I do this, I want to be reviewing completed tasks with a dashboard widget, which if you guys are not using dashboards, please use dashboards. They're so helpful. But I want to review completed tasks and I want to identify things that I can actually take off my plate because I told you my goal here is to get routine tasks off of my plate. So my capacity is 100% for improvements or growth things, deep work, strategy consulting, doing these kinds of things. So to kind of get to that goal, I want to have a weekly review here or bi weekly review every other week review of completed tasks. So after that it's going to be moving things to the task list. Now I have designated time to evaluate capacity on a two week basis which is far enough away that I can really project, but close enough that it's not, it's not crazy, right? It's not procrastinating. It's close enough that I can understand it. Once I know I have capacity in the next two weeks based on all of the stuff I have, all the data I will have by being consistent with points, I will move it into the appropriate list. And again I'm going to keep it pretty simple. So after that I'm going to give it a task due date and assignee required for all tasks. And just like before keeping the due date as the date it should be done. So that is what I have for my 2021 personal productivity workflow. Now if you're like, okay, cool, that's great, we're not done yet. I'm going to go through two more sections today talking about productivity. If you're not the admin in your ClickUp account and I'm going to talk about some templates that we can create from this workflow. I need another water break, perhaps a water and coffee break here. So also I haven't heard from you guys in a while. I'm not, I'm not seeing any comments come in. So let me know if you're enjoying this. Is this making sense to you? Is this just like way too personal and not applicable to you at all? The idea of moving from a guilt capitalism task based system to just doing a little bit of everything system to trying to be a whole lot more intentional in what you're doing. Is anyone else following a similar journey here? No. No. Okay, I'll leave it there. But I'd love to hear from you guys. So let me know if I'm crazy Here we're going to transition now to A lot of the stuff I talked about involves not just changing my flows and favorite views, but also changing the ClickUp workspace and changing my day, my calendar. Some of you do not have that level of control over your work. And if you were an employee, if you are maybe in a freelance position where you have less control, you might not have the luxury of some of the things that I talked about above. It's just not going to work for the way your work happens. I would argue that if you're a business owner, there's no excuse not to have at least as much luxury of control as what I've talked about here. But if that is truly not possible for you, I want to give you three steps that anyone, no matter what level you're at, what level of freedom you at, you're at, you can apply into your ClickUp account if you're in a workspace. So first of all, define your triage method. Actually, I think this is going to go right into what you're talking about. Lei. I think this is exactly. Hopefully this one is going to bring it home for you. So the first thing is define your triage method. I talked about before about tracking things by due date. For some things, I use due date. For some things, I used my Google Calendar to tell me what to do next. For some people, you use priority flags. Whatever it is for you, I want you to define what that is. And then at the everything level, create a view like this one, which I believe compass you guys, you asked about this earlier, about how my focus view is set up. I actually have a screenshot of it right here, which I should have remembered earlier. This is a view I have at everything level and it is, as you can see here, a personal view. And when I created that view, I have it grouped by due date. I have subtasks shown separately and I have it filtered. For me, that is kind of the three settings I have. And then I add this baby to my favorites. That's. This is the thing that will allow you to create your own triage method no matter how ClickUp is set up. This is why the vertical hierarchy does not matter, because I can create my own view like this at everything. Who cares about the hierarchy at that point? It's just coming in in the order that I choose through what my preferences are here. You might choose to group by priority, you might choose to group by, I don't know, custom field that says how you feel that day. It could be anything. But this is how I have mine set up in my view based on my triage method here of due date for routine tasks. For not routine tasks I do not use due date like you saw. I use that that rating system and that priority system and soon I'll be using points. So just seeing some of the comments that came in here. Thank you guys. Now I earned a water break. Okay, so I just joined but moving to more intention. Yes, exactly. See you just joined but you got the main point so that's good that you're still here. Love to see some ClickUp views have a better understanding. Hopefully this is going to make sense for you here because I'm trying to break down some of the views that I use. Devin asks I'm sorry if I'm butchering names how to make reoccurring tasks for habits I wanted to reset to do if I miss mark and complete each day. Any idea? So yeah, chat. Feel free to chime in. Help them out here or her out or them out or person out, animal out. Who knows. I would like to point out as a little spoiler here, I thought it was actually going to be today. I misremembered Friday. DevinT Somehow I read your mind. And we're releasing a video about recurring tasks on Friday. And in that video I'm actually going through the most common FAQs including this one on Friday. So if you want to tune in, make sure you subscribe to the channel on Friday you'll see a video come out about this very thing that's going to talk about making it stay complete. If you want it to stay complete or if you want it to mark complete automatically, it's there. But the answer lies in legacy recurring but also chat. If you can help them out in advance, that'd be awesome. Absolutely. The stream is pausing so going to go back and watch. Oh no, it's pausing. Hopefully it renders better. Let me know if there's ongoing issues here. I spend so much time looking for what I want to work on. Oh my gosh. Yeah Ashley, watch my 2020. You didn't already? That 2020 review is pretty much exactly what you're describing there. I'm just spending a lot of time deciding what to do and very little time effectively doing those things. This thing. Yeah, I'm sorry the stream is glitching out. I hope my Internet's being a little bit better behaved now, but there you go and no worries. Well, it looks like you've also got some help in the chat there, so that's some good stuff. Check out for Friday for that recurring video. So anyway, back to the Back to the stream, guys. I gotta focus here now. I'm feeling so good now because I have some water. Oh, thank you. It's not pausing. A little bit of relief. I appreciate that defining your triage method is important. I gave you a few different examples. If you watch from the beginning of the stream of three really four different ways, you can choose to triage, priority date, workload, mood, anything you can put in ClickUp you can choose to group by and sort by and then make your favorite view. After you do that, create a personal view for that thing. You can choose to do what I was doing in 2020 and create a different view for each hat that you wear in your business. Which can be great if you really like to work on different things at a different time. If you're more of a multitasker and you like to switch hats often, maybe you're a business owner and you just need to flip the hats often. Maybe doing what I'm doing in 2021 might be a good fit for you. If you're someone that really only wears one role, you focus on one thing in the business, perhaps you're an employee and you do one thing, then it's probably just going to be due date based and create a personal view at everything level for your due dates because your tasks are your tasks are your tasks. So there you go, that one and then favorite with a name for each view. This is not this one's not rocket science. But I'm going to show you one thing that you might mistake here that is important to not miss. So we're favoriting a name for each view. You see the ones that I have here which we've already talked about in the stream, but this important one is the most important thing to have favorited both for yourself and for your team. While all of These views here, 1, 2 and 3 are all personal views for me on inbox sort or on business sort, I have different ones. This is something that I've shared with everybody. I have my own favorite for it, but the actual view itself everyone is able to get to. And this is basically the view that links to our list in ClickUp where we put all of our ideas. I think one thing that's important if you have a team that's going through productivity and not just your own self, you know, solopreneur hat. I need my team to get on board with this because if they're creating tasks for aspirational things, but I'm not. Well, it gets really confusing. A lot of these standards we talked about, about having due dates or not having due dates or having assignees or not having assignees. This needs to be across the board consistent for everybody, which is going to. I'll talk more about this at the end of the stream here shortly, but I need them on board and so having an ideas area is one of the most important areas to build in your CL in your ClickUp. I typically build it out for myself or for clients with this kind of inbox looking icon. This is not to be confused with the ClickUp inbox. This is just an emoji here. But this is where I put potential tasks, everything. Unless it is a pressing urgent matter, like a client tells us that we broke a template or something like that, unless it's that kind of thing, it goes in the ideas area first and it has to go through triage before we do it. No matter how excited I am about it, it has to go through triage. And my goal is that triage eventually will not be done by me, but by my project manager. And that will allow me to stay focused and not try to do too much. That is personally my weakness, as we've talked about here. So that's what I'm trying to build systems around. Build systems around your own weakness. Yours might be different, but this inbox, please leave in the chat like do you guys have an inbox? If anyone does use an inbox, I think we saw a few people post earlier that said they do use an inbox system. Can you just say like yes or inbox or something? Because I know there's going to be dozens, if not hundreds of people watching this in the future who are going to be listening to me talk about this and say why do I need an inbox? Why does it matter? Anyone else like find major value in this? Because this is one of those features I think every single account, especially teens, need to use. So that way every task isn't always looking like a task. So leave a comment if you guys use inbox Loud and clear because there's going to be a lot of folks who don't believe me here that it is so, so useful. Chill. Hello new friends joining us. John, glad you're using an inbox as well. Joseph. Yep, exactly. It's most of these principles are old as time and it's these are, these are old principles but we need to apply them to modern technology. So certain things about GTD I've actually I've needed to modify when I've applied it because ClickUp is a little different than the time that GTD was created, in my opinion. But so many of these principles are the same. Brianna says just started my business and ClickUp Too much going on. Yes, exactly. Well, this kind of comment here, guys, I'm going to count this as a vote for inbox because if you have all of the tasks and they're not getting done by the due date, you probably are setting due dates the wrong way. If you have a lot of overdue tasks, it's not your fault. Well, it's kind of your fault, but it's your past self's fault. It's not current you your fault. It's the past self who is setting these aspirational due dates without asking you, without consulting, without thinking. So if you have a lot of overdue tasks for yourself or your team, this is most likely the issue. Most likely. I mean, there's a lot of things, but most likely it's this. Okay, moving on. Wrapping up with our last segment of today. Just to recap where we came from. So we're all oriented. I need to go into that. Today we talked about what is productivity? Three different productivity workflows in ClickUp. Productivity as a guest or member who doesn't have full control. Now I'm going to talk about templates and how we apply this in ClickUp, which ties into some of the habit questions that I think Devin was asking earlier. Every single month I am fixing my ClickUp and I'm also releasing templates and new videos about certain types of things on the YouTube channel, as you guys probably saw in the video description. If you haven't, you can check that out. I try to have a theme for the channel each month, a thing that we are focused on improving so we can get a real result by focusing again, our energy on one thing. Because if we focus, we can get a lot further than if we're doing a little bit all over the place. This month's theme is all about personal productivity and personal focus, which is kind of a meta theme. But I thought for January, since everyone's setting all these ridiculous goals and New Year's resolutions and all that stuff, I wanted to kind of have our channel and our content focus on the basics and on the core and on efficiency and effectiveness rather than just doing so in that spirit. Here are the templates that we are planning on releasing this month. If you're clicking at member, this is probably the first time you're hearing this because I haven't formally presented these before. We released them before. But this is what I'm thinking is going to be the new batch of templates that get released to clicking up members this month and really, really excited about them. And this ties into some of what we talked about before. And I'm going to go through these because even if you guys aren't clicking up members, you won't get my templates. But I want to give you these as almost process prompts. One of the biggest things you guys have you've posted about when in the Facebook group, the free Facebook group. If you guys want to join, it's ProcessDriven Co Group, I believe ProcessDriven Co Group. I asked you what do you need to get your ClickUp and processes in order and overwhelmingly it was action steps, prompts, inspiration. And so here you go. Even if you don't join clickingup, you can create these things I'm about to talk about. I'm going to give you the description here. So first of all, ClickUp conventions. I was talking previously about using an idea, sorting, making sure your whole team is on the same page. This is exactly where this starts. Having this way. No, this way. Clicking up conventions, a rule of best practices that is in your ClickUp account, probably in a ClickUp doc if you're using doc based sops. And it literally just lays out the rules of the road like the kitchen rules, if you will, for your shared ClickUp account. ClickUp is not a private experience. It's a lot like a company kitchen, a break room. You need to all agree on where does trash go, who cleans up when all that stuff. That is what I can never do this the right direction. This. That's what this is all about, defining your conventions. So if you watch through my videos, keep notes because I mentioned conventions as I go. If you're a Cooking up member, I'm going to give you I have this pretty beefy doctor template I'm excited about. It goes through. I think it's like 10 different conventions at this point that you want to have defined for your team and it's fill in the blank. So it's not like this is the way it must be. It's here's a rule you want to define. You can go this way, that way, or your own way. Here's the blank. You can kind of take it from there. So do you guys have any ClickUp conventions that you use in your workspace? I know one that we have is no due date unless there's actually a due date. And everything has an assignee unless it's an idea. In which case we have those idea rules. What do you guys have any good conventions? Maybe we can give yourself some starting points here. Hey, CFO hire, I'm so glad this information is helping and good use of emojis. We've been pretty light on emojis today. So if you guys have any conventions, good rules of thumb, you can watch my videos and you can probably get a good dozen of them. At least little rules here in there. Best practices. But we're going to have a whole doc template here into the clicking up group. The other thing you might want to create, and I'm prompting you here, this is just go ahead and do it. You can do it in 20 minutes for each draft of this stuff is a wiki prompt. So there are two types of docs you might have in your ClickUp. If you're building a business instruction manual, which is what I am an advocate for, you can have SOPs which are giving you procedures, standard operating procedures, how do you do something? And then you might have wiki, which is more of like a library style. You go there when you need something. I believe every team should have a wiki page in their ClickUp. About ClickUp. There's really no excuse not to have it. What a wiki page will tell you a wiki prompt will be. Here's the tool. Here's how you get started using it. Here's how someone can add you to the tool. Here's what your password and login should be. Not specifically, but instead saying like use your own account or use our shared Account or Access LastPass, that kind of stuff and FAQs, those five pieces. In ClickingUp you're going to get a prompt with all of these different elements, which I should just keep. I keep talking about clicking up. If you don't know what it is, it's our community, you can check it out. ProcessDriven co. This is where all these templates are gonna live. For members who are in it, for even those of you who are not members, you can create this, right? Create a wiki prompt for ClickUp, especially if you are hiring or you have a team. Because I'm gonna bet like I created our whole section about technology. We have probably two dozen tools and I probably more than that, probably three dozen technology tools, SaaS, tools that we use in the business. And we have a pretty simple tech stack. I clean house very often, but we still have a lot of technology we're using. I'm using five different technologies right now for this live stream. And so I want you to make sure that you have a blank page for a tool wiki in your ClickUp account and then duplicate it and create a page for every single tool you use in your business, which you can then use and repurpose for team onboarding. So all about double utility here. Next template we're going to be creating, which you can also create for yourself here is a personal onboarding task template. So a lot of the times we think of onboarding as a thing that your team needs to do on behalf of the new person, but when that new person comes into ClickUp, there's certain things that they need to do, whether they're a client, a guest, a member, a co owner, things like adjusting your notification settings. I actually did a video about creating your ClickUp account and it went through some certain activities that you should really do when you get started. This task template could be a great way for you to make a process for that and assign it to the next hire that you have in your organization. And if you're not hiring, hold off on this. But if you're hiring, there's no excuse not to do this. As you go, define what things you want someone to do or need someone to do when they're joining ClickUp or just your company in general. What do they need to configure email signatures, notification, settings, passwords. I mean anything like that would be great to have in that task. Now the final template that is coming into ClickingUp, but I also want to prompt you guys to consider Creating is an okr/goal list template. There's actually a template like this in ClickUp itself, I think, or it's coming soon. This isn't a very complex one, but it's literally just going to be creating a task list with a template, kind of a pre made structure for how to organize goals in ClickUp. You're going to see more of this on the YouTube channel after I create it for clicking up members, you're going to be getting this structure drop later this month. So shameless plug really quick. I promise. If you guys want to see all this stuff and if you don't want to just create it from scratch, that's what we like. That's a piece of the puzzle inside clickingup in the community. I think we have a few community members here. If you do, just feel free to say hi because maybe some people have questions. But this is like the place that I'm doing most of my work about ClickUp these days and this is where we're releasing templates Every month we have. Oh, it doesn't say all of them. There's a lot of templates down here that you're not able to see on the screen, but just some of the basic ones. We're focused right now on personal productivity, but we've got some stuff on example statuses, example dashboard formulas. So many templates and templates aren't the solution. They're not. But templates paired with processes, they can be really, really powerful. And we're really trying to focus on the process and SOP side of things. So if you guys are interested in that, you're tired of just watching tons of YouTube videos and kind of guessing clicking up would be the place to be for yourself or if you're a team, to get yourself organized. So on the roadmap for mid-2020, I talked about this already. If you guys are interested in this, leave a comment. We're going to be doing, I think, a guided ClickUp cleanup. If you guys find it helpful, if it all lines up, we'll be doing like a guided event where we'll show you how to clean up your ClickUp one step at a time by following some simple prompts and kind of pair it with like a goal setting kind of thing, I think. Still working out the kinks on that. So let me know if you're interested. Yeah, so if you're interested in more of this stuff, if you enjoyed this livestream today at all, would you mind like, giving this video a thumbs up? It doesn't. There was a comment recently who pointed this out. Giving a thumbs up to a video costs you absolutely nothing. But especially on YouTube but also on Facebook, if you don't engage with the content, that does not help this video reach anybody. But if you do anything, a comment, a live chat, a thumbs up, this will show this video to more people in the algorithm. And I mean, why not? I didn't realize until I was a creator how much that helps. So please, even if you don't want to join one of our paid services, just give this video a thumbs up. That's a great payment you can do. If you do want help with your ClickUp though, and you want to work with me and you want to be in the community with us, just join clickingup. All right, so I'm going to look for out for any last questions in the chat here. PAS says ClickUp cleanup, thumbs up. You got it. I do think it'll be really cool. And yeah, I think I've got a date with the rest of this cup of coffee. To wrap up my morning here and yeah, I think that's it. Thank you guys for joining me for this video about personal productivity. I guess I should wrap up with like a nice little like what I told you kind of thing because I know that's what you're supposed to do. So in this live stream, what we talked about is what is productivity? The three different productivity workflows that I've used in ClickUp and apparently I'm also pasting random things. We talked about productivity as a guest and a member and we talked about new templates that are coming in clickingup or templates or processes that you can create for yourself for free inside ClickUp to make this stuff happen. If you guys have any questions about personal productivity or personal use of ClickUp, which I did not talk about today, just let me know. All right, well, I will see you guys next time and look out for that video Friday, Devin, about the recurring tasks and hope you all have a great rest of your week. Bye.