5 ClickUp Dashboard MISTAKES (+ easy fixes for beginners!)

ClickUp Dashboards are super powerful. And if you are as excited about ClickUp Dashboards as most of our clients inside the ProcessDriven membership are, odds are you are creating dashboards all over the place. You are going dashboard crazy. But before you get ahead of yourself, I want to dedicate this video to some of the mistakes I see when new folks are getting started with ClickUp Dashboards in the hopes that you can avoid them as you go on your merry way. So we're going to be covering fun five different mistakes ranging from beginner to advanced throughout this quick video. And if you want any pointers about anything we're talking about here, head down to the description where we're going to have an additional resource in case you want to learn more. But I think that's about everything. Let's start off with mistake number one. Now, Watchers is the thing in ClickUp that's kind of like followers in Facebook. You know when you're like following a post and you get notified? Yeah, that's what Watchers are in ClickUp. And if you are someone who is watching something, you're going to get notified about activity. But if you are not watching something, you're not going to have any idea what's happening there. Now, what does this have to do with Dashboards? Well, many of you love Dashboards for the fact that it has this thing called a chat widget or chat view. This little chat room that you can add into your dashboard is a staple of pretty much any client portal or collaboration hub you're going to build inside a ClickUp dashboard. The thing is, as great as this chat view looks or this chat widget looks, if no one is a watcher on this chat widget, then people aren't going to be notified about you posting into this chat widget. Right? So if you were inviting a new client into your ClickUp account or a new team member into your team chat, make sure you're adding relevant people. As a watcher, you can do that by either tagging somebody using the little mention, or just adjusting the watchers by clicking on the little eyeball at the top of that chat widget. Alright, so mistake number one, forgetting about Watchers, the second mistake I see is folks not using the duplicate option with Dashboard. I know it seems like an obvious one, but I had to include it here at the time of recording. ClickUp Dashboards cannot be templated. That'll likely change very soon and when it does, we'll make a video. But. But at this point, Dashboards require you to Manually create them every time, and that's fine. But rather than manually creating them, let's make our manual process a bit easier. Every single dashboard has the option to duplicate it by going under the three dots next to the name of your dashboard. Inside this little menu, you can click duplicate and wow, there you go. A dashboard that looks exactly like what you have already created will appear. This works for entire dashboards as well as for widgets inside an existing dashboard. The mistake I see is folks recreating the wheel manually every time when duplication either of a widget or an entire dashboard would save them a ton of manual work. So mistake number two, forgetting about duplication. The third mistake I see when it comes to dashboards is adding filters, which are great, but but then only adding them to each individual widget again, making our lives much harder. What this looks like is you go into a dashboard and you say, hey, I just want to report on, let's say, this client's list. You edit that widget, you make sure it's only reporting on this client's list. That sounds fine. And then you repeat that for every other widget because this dashboard is for one client. The reason this is a mistake is not the fact that you're filtering. In fact, that is fantastic. The mistake is that you are filtering on each widget one by one. When ClickUp now allows us to set up dashboard wide filters, the way we would correct this mistake is rather than setting up our filters one by one on each widget, we would go up to the top of the dashboard, locate the filter options, and set up a filter for the entire dashboard. You set up the filter once it applies everywhere, tons of manual time saved. This is an easy one, but definitely one I don't see practiced enough. Mistake number four, I see is a bit of a tricky one. So this is going to make up for those easier ones at the onset. But mistake I see is people forgetting about how permissions work. Now, I know you might be sitting there saying, how do I forget about permissions? You know, I invite someone to the dashboard, we're good. That is true, but there's also permissions when it comes to what you put in your dashboard. So for example, if I put a task list widget in this dashboard, you see on the screen, the only thing I'm going to see on this task list widget is the tasks that meet the criteria of the widget. So they're in the right spot, they have the right things that they need to filter, and I, the viewer, have permission to see These given tasks, if I do not have permission to see the tasks, this whole task list widget is going to show up blank. Does that make sense? Do you get it? So let's just imagine you invite your client into ClickUp. You have a task list widget in a client portal you've built. You share only the dashboard with that client. They don't have access to anything else. That task list widget is going to show up blank for them because they do not have permissions to see the tasks that you are putting on that task list widget. You with me? Yeah. Okay. That is a very common mistake I see, when folks are using ClickUp, particularly with clients. Now, to be clear, I'm all for keeping restrictive permissions, but we cannot expect someone to be able to see something that we don't give them access to. So what is the workaround here? The solution for this common mistake is to utilize embed views using embedded public views of ClickUp instead of task list widgets. I know that sounds like foreign language, but basically a task list widget or any of the other widgets that they're showing dynamic information from ClickUp that requires permissions to the source list. However, if we don't want to do that, we can use a public view. That public view is a link that you can generate to allow anyone to see that information. You then take that link that anyone can see and you embed that into a dashboard that only whoever you share it with can see. Does that make sense? The link is public, but you're embedding it in a private spot. Okay. With that public embed view, the client, in this example, if you invite them into that dashboard, they will be able to see the contents of that embed view, even if they do not have access to the task list. Even if that's the only spot they have access to. Even if they're not even in ClickUp, if they get that link or if they see that embed view, they'll be able to see the contents. Now, I know that was a lot. So if you're not with me and you're like, what did she just say up at the top of the video here, I'll have a link to another video where we go much deeper in the whole client portal use case. That breaks down this whole embed view, public view, list view, it breaks it all down in case this was a bit confusing. Okay, so that is mistake number four. I hope some of that made sense. Let's move on to number five. Yeah, this is the same pretty much in every mistakes video we make here on the channel. So often we see people throwing more software, more features, more shiny stuff, more dashboards when they don't really know why they're doing it. If the dashboard is not there to solve a specific problem, don't have it, delete it. You don't need it. If it's not there to solve a collaboration gap or a feature that you need to see. If it's not solving a problem, don't have a dashboard. It's just one more link to get lost in. And let's be real, ClickUp has enough clicks to get lost in. We don't need to add more. So fifth, final easy but also hard mistake to avoid is don't add a dashboard unless that dashboard is going to solve a specific problem that you, your users, your clients, your stakeholders, your ClickUp environment is really facing. Okay, cool. So that concludes our wrap up of five ClickUp Dashboard mistakes. If you found this video interesting and you're wondering what other mistakes you might be making, you're probably going to enjoy this video next. And I would encourage you to check out the description below. In there I have a link to my ClickUp mini course that goes through not only the fundamentals of using ClickUp, including how to avoid so many of the bad habits I talk about on the YouTube channel, but also that course includes a bunch of use cases such as how to start your day, how to communicate efficiently. If you find yourself wondering what other mistakes am I making, check out that link in the description below and drop me a comment. And like this video, you know, do all that stuff. If you have any questions or you want to, just let me know how you're feeling. All right, so that is it for this quick video. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.