5 ClickUp Best Practices for Your Business

If you are implementing a project management tool like ClickUp, there are two layers to the complexity. First, there's a confusing tool, right? ClickUp is not the easiest learning curve. Second, there's the actual systems that you are changing. The fact is, you're probably changing from one project management system to another, not just for shiny new features, although those can be very nice. You're probably changing because something in your workflow is not working. There is something you are trying to actually accomplish. So just like we're trying to change our workflow by implementing a new software, as we implement that new software, we need to have certain expectations set for how we want our overall project management system to work. So you're going to hear me talk about this a lot lately, but system is not the software. And basically the tool you're using to manage your work is not the be all, end all of the process. We also need to have rules in place for how the humans need to handle themselves in the software. And that is what we're going to be talking about today as we go through five rules or best practices when it comes to using ClickUp with your team or even just for yourself, to make sure that the system is truly working for you. So, without further ado, let's just dive into the first rule of thumb here, which is ideas are not always tasks. In fact, very few of your great ideas are actually going to be that great when you think about them in relation to everything else your team has to do. So when it comes to ClickUp, we want to make sure that we are separating idea creation from promising to do something. Okay, so really what we're talking about here is capacity management. Whether you're using ClickUp or Asana or Monday, I don't care. I just want to make sure that you have a separation of idea generation or idea capturing from yes, we are committing to do this on our calendar and we are committing is a very good framework for thinking about this, because that's what you're doing when you're setting a due date and an assignee on a task in ClickUp or task in Asana or Card and Trello. When you're doing that, you are committing to doing something, something. It may or may not affect other people if it doesn't get done in that time. But you are making a commitment. And we want to be people of our word here. We want to know that the deadlines that we place are meaningful deadlines. So we only want to put them on tasks that are actually tasks that need to be done. So every team should have an idea collection area that is separate in some way, whether that's a status or just separate lists from your promising to do or your actual task areas. Now to jump forward into the second rule of thumb, we want to think about how we are storing information. And in ClickUp, or really any project management tool, we want to prioritize the ease of information retrieval. This basically means we want to make it easier to find the information later, even if that means it's harder to put the information away now. So to just briefly break this down, all information that we have that we're putting in ClickUp, whether that's a chat comment, an attachment, an actual task itself, there's the input of creating that task or writing that comment, and there's the output of looking for that task later or looking for that comment later. We want to make sure we are making it easy to find the information later because that is ultimately what's going to matter most. One of the most common mistakes and bad habits I see people bring into ClickUp from non project management tools like Excel or Slack that they were using previously for project management is doing the opposite of this advice where rather than making it really easy to find information, they go all for convenience of posting something. So you might have a huge Slack file called clients and you're just constantly posting updates about every client all in one big Slack channel. But when you have to find that information later, you're searching and searching and searching and you could never find it. Or you might have an SOP vault inside a Dropbox folder and you're just throwing video files from loom inside that Dropbox folder, which I do not recommend for various reasons. But when it comes time to find those videos you recorded, you didn't name them properly, they're just all thrown together. Yes, it was very easy for you to add those files in, but finding the files is a full time job and that is what we want to avoid with ClickUp. Because there are so many layers available, we want to make sure that you are keeping your information as low, AKA as specific in the hierarchy as possible. Always use the comments area in a task before you go to a chat view. Use every layer in the hierarchy available before you jump up to the next one. So you're making sure that you're being very specific. So that way when I'm looking for something, I can look in the most specific area and see just what I'm looking for, even if that means taking a few more clicks when you're first adding the information in. So while it might take longer to look for a task and write a comment on it than to send an email, just very quickly checking in on a task or ultimately in the long run looking for that task and writing the comment there is going to give you one cohesive activity log versus sending one off emails which are fast to do but hard to retrace your steps and hard to keep everything organized. Bite the bullet on this one. It is going to be a culture change for those of you used to email, but keep information where you are going to look for it when you're trying to retrieve it later. That brings us to number three here, our third rule for ClickUp use, which is that subtasks are greater than assigned comments, which are greater than comments, which is basically a fancy way of saying know what the difference is and stick to it. Now I could probably make a whole other video on this, maybe I will one day. But the rule of thumb here is that a comment is just an FYI if that comment is also something that you need to have done, if there's an action required in that comment, it needs to be an assigned comment. And if that assigned comment will take more than 10 minutes for someone to reasonably do, skip the assigned comment and make a subtask. Now that is my own personal rule. You might customize this for your own organization, but that is what I'm meaning here by subtasks are greater than assigned comments, which are greater than comments. By default, everything new you're creating should start off as a comment, and if we decide that it requires action on someone else's part, we assign that comment. And if that action takes more than 10 minutes, that's the 10 minute rule I'm alluding to here. It should become a subtask, not an assigned comment. Because subtasks people can schedule on their calendar, people can keep track of easier, whereas assigned comments just kind of float there. And if an assigned comment cannot be done quickly, it should be promoted, meaning just recreate it, but it should be promoted to a subtask instead. And this is a simple triage rule that you can set in place so people know when to do what. Because when people aren't certain about things, they tend to just not do any of them and send that email instead. And you know, just reference the last point as to why that's not ideal. So rule number four for using ClickUp with your team is to make sure your tasks always have due dates and assignees. Now this one is actually a fun one because it came up recently on a consulting call. And for those of you on that call, call, nice to see you again and I hope you remember this conversation. But they came to me and said, hey, I heard that you talked about the fact that everything should have a due date and assignee. So we started giving everything in our ClickUp account a due date and an assignee and it's become utter chaos. And the reason it became utter chaos for them is because they actually ended up putting assignees and due dates on everything. Every row in ClickUp, no matter what it represented, had an assignee and a due date. Now I gotta reference us back to the very first rule we talked about. Not every idea is a task. So even though ClickUp calls everything tasks in their ClickUp account, this rule is referring to, I guess what you could consider lowercase tasks, meaning things you need to do regardless of what they look like in ClickUp. A thing you need to do has to have an assignee and a due date. That does not mean your ideas should have an assignee and a due date. Very important note there. Do not get tripped up on this. Now, to actually keep an eye on this, to make sure that you are following this rule, I would suggest creating a team monitoring dashboard, which is actually something I just released a video on up here. It would be a good one to watch for this particular one, but you basically want to make sure that this number is always zero. You want to make sure that you always have zero actual tasks that do not have both a due date and an Assignee, because those two elements are what keep things organized inside the ClickUp system. Now, rule number five for using ClickUp our last rule for today is to make sure that your notifications are kept in check. Notifications in ClickUp are one of the weirdest things for new users who aren't used to project management to get used to. ClickUp has a lot of notification options, but they are still a little aggressive for most people's taste. And especially if you haven't adjusted your notification settings, which if you haven't go up here to the first hour and ClickUp video and just take care of this because it's rather late than never. Make sure you get these things wrangled. But these notifications are alerting you about changes in your ClickUp system and if you have too many notifications coming in, they all just become noise and you ignore all of them. The problem with this is potentially important information can be in notifications. Notifications effectively become the newsfeed of your business. What's happening today are there any fires I need to worry about? Is there anything really important that might disrupt my day going on? That's all in notifications. And if you have more than 100 notifications in place, you're not going to see it because you're going to be drowning in just noise that you won't be able to focus on the important things in your business. So make sure if you have anyone on your team that has more than 100 notifications, intervene, make a change, make sure that they are getting caught up and whatever is causing them to have so many notifications, make sure that is resolved. Now one of the most common reasons I see people get inundated with notifications, assuming their settings are correct, is due to templates which actually save watchers baked into the template. So if you're the person that created the template every time that template is used, if you're not careful, you will automatically be added as a watcher. Now that's probably a whole other video in and of itself. So if you like that kind of stuff and you'd like to see about that particular notifications, quirk definitely like and subscribe. So you see when that video comes out. Now for this one, just like the one before, you're going to want to make sure you have a way of monitoring this activity to make sure you're keeping an eye on people's notifications. And the best way I can think to do that is to again use a dashboard called a Team Monitoring Dashboard with different elements including the who's behind widget. Again, I already linked above the video for this one, but just just go watch that video. It's probably in the description too. Go watch it and that will help you figure out how to manage this piece. Now just briefly here, we went through five different examples of rules that you might want to have in place in order to build out a project management system using ClickUp and just general project management principles. These are not by any means the only rules you want to have in place. So for those of you watching, I would appreciate you helping me out by leaving a comment with what your best practice or your rule of thumb would be for using ClickUp with your team. I'll also say we do have a resource that might help you with this. So inside clickingup our membership, we have templates available and one of the templates we have is a ClickUp Conventions template. It gives you a bunch of rules of thumb and things to keep in mind when managing your ClickUp account. So if you're looking for kind of a fill in the blank template for the rules you might want to have in place for your own ClickUp account. That will be the template I would check out. It's inside Clickingup Community link in the description below. And it is our ClickUp convention. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? ClickUp Conventions Raw just sounds so formal. ClickUp Conventions but you know ClickUp Conventions Rules of thumb. If you're a member, check it out. If you're not a member, consider joining. Alright, so that is it for this video. I hope this was a helpful one for you. Please do leave your own pro tips in the comments. Until next time. Enjoy the process.