5 Tips for Being More Productive for Solopreneurs using ClickUp

I received an email from one of you who asked me, quote, how do I get ClickUp to kick my own butt? And in this particular context, this person who sent this email is managing multiple businesses, has a lot going on, and is just drowning in the volume of work that needs to be done. And in response to this, and also in celebration of the new year and all those resolutions that I'm sure we're all going to keep, I have five tips for you guys in terms of getting ClickUp or whatever project management tool you use to kick your own butt. But before we get to that, I want to just clarify that regardless of what the marketers say, you're not going to necessarily get more done just because of ClickUp. However, there is a lot of value in having clarity when it comes to what should I do next? And there are five settings we can set inside of ClickUp to have ClickUp act more like that secretary kind of sitting over our shoulder and saying hey next, do this, hey next to that. It's not the same as really kicking our butt, but it gets us closer and that's what this video is going to be about. Oh, and I should say this particular person was a solopreneur, meaning a one person operation, someone who's just trying to get their own stuff done. So while there is tons of value in delegation, and I have other videos about that, this video is focused on you solos who are trying to just get your own butt in gear. So I think that's enough butt talk for one introduction. Let's get to tip number one. So tip number one is to reduce the noise. Get rid of anything out of your view that is not something that you can actually do. One easy way to do this is to actually use Me mode built right into ClickUp. You can find Me mode by going into any particular view, including this list view here, clicking on the word me. This will filter you no matter where you go in your navigation, to always view things in Me mode. It kind of follows you around. Or you can set it on a per view basis by going up into settings and defaulting something to Me mode. That way, when you're navigating around. Normally you won't see things in Me mode, but if you ever go to that new view, it forces you right back into Me mode because Me mode only shows you things assigned to you where you're the assignee or you're on the team that is assigned the task. It allows you to declutter and only focus on what exactly is on your to do list. Now, while you're in there and messing around with views, I want to highlight some of the other filters you can use to help you cut back the noise. Because that sense of overwhelm, of the amount of work to be done, is usually because you end up with some kind of giant list, like maybe everything on here, and you're just drowning because there's just such a high volume. So what we can do to make this less overwhelming is actually to group it into chunks. So, for example, grouping by due date can be a great exercise. You can collapse your overdues, collapse your no due dates, and just look at certain dates at a time. This lets you focus in on what you actually need to do on each day and know that that overdue is just kind of there when you have more time. If you're someone who doesn't use due dates, perhaps you use dependencies. And if you do, you can do the same kind of thing. Instead of grouping by due dates, we'll group by the default status. And instead what we're going to do is come up to filters and say dependency doesn't have waiting on, meaning don't show me any tasks that are waiting on something else and cannot be done right now. This kind of filter works really well if you use dependencies and you say, hey, I have these 100 tasks, but I can really only do these two, they're blocking everything else. Well, if that's the case for you, this kind of filter is going to cut back all that other noise and let you focus on just the tasks you can actually do right now. On a personal note, this kind of filter is something that I use all the time on our home renovation projects because as many of you probably can relate to with home renovation, there are so many things going on, but really only a few you can do at one time because there's so many dependencies, so many things that need to be done in front of the other. So as we're talking about decluttering and getting rid of the noise and only focusing on what you need, I want to talk about that little ping in your ear called notifications as well. Now, this is a demo account, but if I went into my ClickUp account and saw 136 notifications in the morning, I would be very scared because that's not what you want for your notifications. Let's think about trying to make ClickUp that awesome assistant or that awesome secretary who tells you exactly what you need to know. Right? Let's picture that would an amazing secretary when you Come in in the morning, tell you every single thing that ever happened since you left. Ah, so and so. Went to the bathroom, the water got refilled, the air conditioning turned off. No, a great secretary or a great assistant would tell you the things that matter to you. And even though ClickUp is a technology, we can dial in our settings a bit to ensure that we're getting that kind of high level reporting when we get to notifications. Because really, that's all you should see in notifications, the stuff you actually need to know to work. So to clean this area up, we're going to head into our notification settings and I want to make sure that you only have notifications on that you actually want to have on. For me, in this demo account, I pretty much have everything off. In my real account, I only have a few more ones on. For example, I like to see when dependencies are unblocked, but otherwise I keep most of these notifications off unless there's a specific thing I am looking for, Right? If this was your assistant and your secretary and they were asking you, hey, do you want me to tell you every time a task location changes? You'd probably say no. And so tell ClickUp that same information, turn these off and only highlight the stuff that you really want to see. So that's declutter tip number two, which is to just declutter your notifications and train your assistant in ClickUp to tell you just what you actually care about. Tip number three for getting ClickUp to kick your butt is to make sure that ClickUp is actually able to talk to you. And one of the biggest problems I see with folks having a hard time communicating with themselves as a Solopreneur while using ClickUp is that they've made ClickUp this key, this, this monster, right? This is this Frankenstein of 30 spaces and 20 lists and 15 million tasks. And they don't actually know where to go when they need to get work done. So one favor you can do for yourself to set ClickUp up as that personal assistant is to simplify it. Give ClickUp a very, very simple structure. I would say no more than very high end Max three spaces as a solopreneur, that is max, max, max. And simplify that structure of spaces, folders and lists so you know exactly where to go to find what you need at any given time, and that you have no extra spaces, extra folders, extra lists. Nothing is extra. By simplifying, you're going to help ClickUp help you to actually get work done, because you won't Be so distracted by the actual messing around and finagling and perfecting of ClickUp, you're decluttering your your work environment. Just like a good assistant would. Declutter your desk, clean the office, make sure there's not piles of papers up here. If you are working in a totally chaotic environment, it's going to be very hard to get a lot of work done. So we want to declutter all of that, starting with the ClickUp vertical hierarchy. Now, tip number four about how to get ClickUp to kick your own butt is to use automations. Now this one might be a little bit surprising because I am making this video for solopreneurs or small teams. And in general, small teams don't use automations that much because a lot of the times automations are used to manage other people or to automate a process. And when you're solo, a lot of the times things are a little bit more manual, more stuff's in your head that's totally okay. But to get ClickUp to really kick your butt, I want you to use automations in a very particular way. In a way I would call an enforcement automation. Now full disclaimer this is a term I created. Just like vertical hierarchy, you won't find much on the Internet about it, so stay till the end because I'll give you the link to a whole video about this topic right at the end. But at a high level, these enforcement automations are automations that basically remind you of things or nag you about things so that the automation becomes the bad guy and not you. For example, if you're a solopreneur and you struggling to get things done, one great automation I would encourage you to have as an enforcement automation is when a task is created or on a list where you keep your tasks and it does not have a due date, force yourself to add a due date. When task is created and due date is not set, add a comment. And what this will do is if you ever find yourself in a rush and you create a task but you forget to put a due date on it, you're going to receive a notification from your own system double checking you and reminding you to send set that due date because that's something that's important to you. Another enforcement automation you might want to try out is when start date arrives. This is particularly helpful if you use start dates and end dates for your ClickUp tasks. For example, your automation could look something like this when the start date arrives. Hey me, this project is starting now. Don't procrastinate this time around, these kind of comments to yourselves can show up in your notifications even though there's no one else in your account and allow you to have these kind of check in moments that could easily just slip under the radar even if you didn't have these automations helping you out. Now, of course, I want to give you one last tip about helping ClickUp kick your butt and this goes back to simplifying, particularly for solopreneurs and that is found in the Settings menu. Once more for this one we're going to go to Workspace Settings, the overall settings you have of your account and we are going to turn on personal workspace layout. Now this only works if you are a solopreneur. You are solo solo. There is no one else with you, no guests, no nothing. And if you're a solo solo, what this personal workspace layout will do is it'll declutter all team based features, it'll automatically assign everything to you without using automations, and it'll just generally declutter your entire workspace. This goes hand in hand with the previous tips around decluttering that virtual desk, except here we're going to declutter the actual feature set so ClickUp can really get out of its own way and let you get massive amounts of work done. Now as promised, I want to wrap up here with giving you a link for the next video I think you need to watch, which is this one right here. This is going to talk all about some of the example automations I would recommend you employ, whether you are one person show or a whole team of people to help enforce the behaviors or even automate the workflows that will help you get more done in less manual time. Which doesn't that just sound nice? I think so. Thank you guys so much for joining me for this quick video. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. And while you're down there please do like and subscribe because you doing those kinds of Things tells YouTube this video is half decent and it'll show it to more people. And this video took a long time to make and if you can help me reach more people for free, I would really appreciate you doing that by clicking that like button right now. Okay, thanks so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process. Sam.