5 Tips to Make ClickUp Less Confusing

I just recently released a video talking about different ways to simplify the ClickUp experience. And if you haven't watched that video, you might want to watch it honestly right after this one, because they're kind of companion pieces. This video is going to walk through a few additional steps you can do to make your ClickUp experience more simplified for the average user. Number one, clarify how individuals should prioritize tasks. In other words, help your people. Whether that's just you or a team of people, answer the question, what should I do next? There are a lot of different ways to figure out prioritization, but whatever method you're going to stick with, identify it and communicate it. Because otherwise ClickUp can just feel like a big old pile of to dos with no real rhyme or reason to how it's all laid out when it comes to deciding what to do next or what your prioritization is. Typically, teams will pick one method as their primary form of deciding priority. It could be priority flags, it could be due date, it could be a mixture. And if that measure of priority is ever tied, say you have two tasks due on the same day, you pick maybe a secondary method to be the tiebreaker. One of the most common ways to determine priority is due dates inside ClickUp, because these are showing up right in your home and it's a really good way to keep things organized. So if you decide that due dates are your number one way to figure out what to do next, you just know that you always start with overdue tasks, then work on tasks due today and kind of work out to the future from that point. Other teams might prefer to skip due dates entirely and just work off of priority flags. This is actually a method that I talked about in my own personal workflows methods in this video about organizing a home renovation in ClickUp, if you're looking to mix and match methods, it might involve something like this. And this is actually the priority matrix that we use inside processdriven. At this point in time, the first way to determine what to do is to look at the task location. So we have task locations for things like emergencies, for routine tasks, and for growth tasks. And when those things are tied, maybe you have multiple things in the issues list. You will use the due dates to break the tie. Both of these two features, the location of the task and the due date, are used in combination to determine priority. Remember, your main goal here is just to answer the question, what should I do next? And make sure that your views, your ClickUp training, and your overall structure reinforces that type of decision making criteria number two is an important one that came up when I recently brought on a team member. She was going through all of the training to learn how to use ClickUp for the first time, and we've got, you know, a good amount of stuff to help her through that. But she pointed out early on that she was really confused with some of the initial trainings because it turns out that her workspace was in modern layout and my workspace was showing things in simple layout. And for someone who's new to ClickUp, the concept of sidebar layouts can be really trippy. In fact, maybe I should clarify what that means now. Sidebar layouts are the different ways that ClickUp can look. It rearranges information using the settings gear on the sidebar. So if you click on that sidebar and adjust your sidebar settings, you can flip between different layouts. Personally, I am a big fan of the simple layout. My team seems to prefer the modern layout, and a lot of our clients seem to enjoy the clean layout. So we have three different interfaces of ClickUp, basically competing side by side. And one thing that you can do to make your ClickUp experience simpler is to either ask everybody to make sure that they're on the same sidebar layout, or at least address the differences. When you're providing training, building sops, sharing screenshots, always make sure that the person who's looking at the screenshot is able to replicate exactly what you have. One easy way to do this is to say, hey, every new employee needs to use modern layout. If you want to change, that's on you. But we are only going to be providing SOPs and documentation showing things in the modern layout of ClickUp. And no matter how you decide to solve this, one important step remains true. Make sure you actually know what screen layouts that people are using to simplify communication. Next up, monitor and discuss regularly weekly. So this is one that's a little bit more on the business workflow side, but in many ways the systems you have impact how your software ClickUp works. If you don't know what I mean about Systeme IO not being a software, watch my rant video up here where I just rant about that topic for like five minutes. But to the point here, we want to make sure that whatever rules we have for our ClickUp, whatever goals we have, whatever objectives we have, we want to make sure that we are actually bringing that up in front of people. So one of the best examples I can think of for this is overdue tasks. We might say we at ProcessDriven will never have overdue tasks. But I gotta be honest with you guys, we've got overdue tasks. And there was a period a few weeks ago where I'll share a screenshot here on the screen, I sent a message into the team group chat, and starting that following week, every team meeting, which was every two weeks, these kind of full team meetings, we would pull up the to do list of everybody and look at the overdue tasks and talk through why they were overdue. The very first time we did this, there were, I don't know, probably about 30 overdue tasks or subtasks that are kind of fallen behind for one reason or another. The vast majority of them were actually done, but weren't marked done or something like that. But still 30 tasks. It was insane. The next time, two weeks later when we did that, I was watching the workspace, and I don't think my team knows this, but I was watching the workspace. And the day before that team meeting, there was a big flurry of tasks being completed went from in progress to closed all of a sudden, the day before that meeting. And the reason I believe this happened is not because my team's lying, because I don't think they would lie, but I think they really felt that sense of accountability that, oh, my gosh, we're about to have to explain why tasks are overdue. I better make sure these are actually accurate and cleaned up so I can avoid that in the group setting. And that accountability. Just sharing on the screen, here's what's overdue. Anyone want to talk about this? Sharing that on the screen for five minutes in a team meeting actually allowed for that process to move more smoothly. And I don't find myself chasing people for due dates anymore as the project manager in the business. Instead, we have that meeting. And I know that at least by that meeting, everything that can realistically be done is going to be done. And the number of overdue tasks we have each meeting keeps decreasing exponentially until eventually, I expect that we maybe have one or two overdues each meeting. Fingers crossed. Number four is design for a vertical hierarchy that's consistent. Now, this is a bit of a niche tip, but if you think about your ClickUp account, we've got the vertical hierarchy of spaces, folders, and lists, and we've got the horizontal hierarchy including custom fields and other elements like that. Together, it makes kind of a matrix of organization where our tasks fall into, much like a spreadsheet when we're designing our ClickUp account, one way to make it very disorienting is to have things rearranging all the time. And I'm not just talking rearranging like you find a better way and you change the structure of something. I'm more so referring here to using spaces, folders and lists for things that change very quickly. You might create a whole folder just for one launch that lasts three days, that you plan and prep in two weeks, and then it disappears and another folder takes its place for the next launch. By having a hierarchy that tends to shift around a lot, it can be kind of disorienting to your team members if the overall containers aren't clear. With the exception of things like Sprint Lists, which if you want to learn about using Agile and ClickUp, you can watch this up here. But with the exception of Sprint Lists, I prefer to build a ClickUp structure wherever possible, where the lists, spaces and folders are changing maybe every few months, but they're not changing every week or every day, they're more or less set. Instead, I'd suggest organizing it in a weights that's consistent. So rather than having folders for the statuses of your list, use list colors and leave this list in one place, or rather than creating a folder for every single launch, you do create a folder called Launches and have a list for every single launch that you have in the entire year. So you always know that if you're looking for a launch, it's in that one list and your favorites and those other things won't break as people are archiving and deleting lists as you go. Now, last but not least, my final tip for simplifying ClickUp today is to avoid the black holes of Shared With Me. So Shared With Me, if you're not familiar, shows up on the left sidebar of ClickUp, and it shows you things where you do not have access to the overall space. It basically creates this floating area of tasks and lists and folders that don't have a home. Otherwise, if you're a guest in ClickUp, you're very familiar with Shared With Me, because that's where pretty much everything you have access to lies because guests do not have access to spaces. If you want to learn more about that, we have a video on the guest experience up here, but my tip here is to avoid having anything end up with Shared With Me. If you're going to be sharing a list with somebody, consider whether or not you could also share the folder it's in, just so someone has some frame of reference for what that list is about. For example, if I had a space called Clients, a folder called Client A, and a list called Website Design. If I only share the list called Website Design and my contractor sees just that list, it's going to be pretty confusing for them to keep track of whose website design we're talking about. However, if I share the whole client folder and share that list inside it now all of a sudden that contractor has a frame of reference for what exactly that list is referring to. By sharing broader containers higher in the hierarchy wherever possible, you make it easier for your team members to find their way around you. Make their view or their experience of ClickUp more similar to your view, which makes communication easier, at least in my experience. You really cut down on miscommunications or frustration from people asking where is that? I can't see that. That doesn't make sense. And you find yourself re explaining and re expl and re explaining. Now, of course, if you have your own questions about how to simplify ClickUp, or if you have your own tips that you'd like to pass along, please do leave it in the comments. And while you're down there, please do like and subscribe because it helps this video reach more people. If you're looking for help with your ClickUp simplification journey, you're trying to just overcomplicate. Stop watching hundreds of videos like this and instead actually get the answers and a clear step by step path. Be sure to check out our membership community. Clicking up the link is in down there. I mean by now you kind of know where that's at. But description. Click on that thing and you'll find the link there to clicking up our membership community. I wish you all the best on simplifying your ClickUp journey and until next time, enjoy the process.