6 Ways to Create SOPs & Template Tasks | Advanced ClickUp Tutorial

Okay. Okay. It is 10 o' clock Eastern, which means it is time for another Workflow Wednesday. Now, this one, I'm just going to be clear and selfish with you that I am commandeering this Workflow Wednesday to talk about something that I. I don't know if any of you are content creators, but it's something that I have been wanting to create content about. And it's just one of those things that I keep kicking down the line and it's such an important topic that I thought, you know what, let's just hijack Workflow Wednesday this week and record a YouTube video live for all of you. Today's topic, if you didn't gather by the description of this. Not the description. Yeah, no description. That's the word. The description of this actual video on YouTube. The topic we're talking about today is the different ways to template tasks in in ClickUp. So this is kind of veering away from what I typically am talking about on Workflow Wednesday because I will not be process mapping today. Instead, I want to handle the tech analysis paralysis that keeps people from going further. In the Facebook group this week, we had a conversation where I forget the exact context, but it was basically around over analyzing the processes that you were building. And I got to be honest with you, this is something that has been coming up a lot for clients recently, where teams are coming on board and they're struggling to figure out to even get started. They have got the process map stuff down. You've seen me do it here on this show where I process map and it's not really that scary of a process, but once they have that map, they're kind of paralyzed and they look at ClickUp, they look at their map, and the divide between those two places is far too large for them to feel comfortable or confident in taking a step forward. So in this video, I'm actually going to be going into ClickUp and showing you ways to bridge the gap. I've done this before when it comes to my newsletter process. Feel free to check out that video. But today, what I'm going to talk about specifically is how to template your process in ClickUp. And 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. There are at least six ways that I have gathered here. And I mean, many of you here are ClickUp users. You understand that complexity is both a blessing and a curse. We have a sophisticated tool in ClickUp, but sometimes the number of options of ways to do things can paralyze your team. So even if you are super tech savvy or you just Enjoy. I was on a conversation this morning where we were talking about how we just enjoy collecting SaaS applications. Even if that's you, the people you're working with may not share that hobby and they want to use the tool just in a simple, like let's get it done kind of way. And this video is really going to be about that. This might be a little bit on the long side, but I hope it'll be packed with value. As I go through this, I would love to hear you guys chime in with telling me how of these systems. What method do you have for templating things in ClickUp, and what do you like or not like about that? If one of these is new to you, please tell me again in the comments if some of these are new methods that you may not have tried yet, or maybe they're methods you used to use and you moved away from. Again, I would love to hear why there are so many ways to template and standardize your processing ClickUp. I'm not going to assume that these six are an exhaustive list, so I would love to have you weigh in and kind of share your thoughts as to how we can mix and match and blend these together to build the most effective way to build processes in ClickUp. So without further ado, let's dive in. I'm going to share a screen up here. I apologize in advance. It's going to be little bit tiny here. So here we are in ClickUp and we're going to just dive right in. Guys. I this, this is a lot to talk about this morning, so I'm going to. I'll get rid of my face and we'll just go on the screen. Here we are in ClickUp in a demo space. I'm going to shrink this. You have it. And I'm going to show you six different ways that you can turn your process map into an actual process in ClickUp. And first of all, let me say, let me just do the general disclaimer. We're using ClickUp here. You can do all of this stuff on the free plan of ClickUp. Everything I'm about to show you is available in the free plan. I think recently I've had a few conversations where people didn't realize there was a free plan. My guess is because ClickUp is trying to not so much promote that anymore because of the fact that they now have investors that they're trying to please. But nonetheless, the free plan is there and all of the stuff I'm about to show you, you can do on the free plan, all of the methods I'm also going to show you do rely on versioning. So in tools like Process street or, you know, other specialty tools, you might have ins. You might have instant updates. When you update a process in ClickUp, it is not that way. ClickUp follows the model that most process or most project management tools use, like Asana and Trello. And basically, to create a template, you're typically saving something and then duplicating it. In a moment of time, you're copying a moment. And for most of these methods, I'm going to show you, they do that same thing where you have a copy of something, you're copying it, that's therefore creating an instance of the process. If you change the process and you have instances of it live, you'd have to manually go through and update all of the ones that are currently in progress. The exception to these are some of these doc methods. The last three I'm going to show you, which do get around the instance issue in kind of a creative way. So if that's something that's frustrating to you, stay tuned for the end where we're going to talk about ways to avoid this headache. So zooming in a bit more so you can see it. The first and most obvious way to create templates in ClickUp would be this. This is where I started when I was first creating templates. So if this is where you're at, I understand. So here we are, and we have template with subtasks method. So basically we have a task, and inside that task we have subtasks for each step. We could assign these steps to certain people, we could give them priorities and due dates, all the things we might want, including dependencies between these sub steps. Let me do the basics and I'll explain what dependencies are in case you're not familiar. But what is nice about this is this is the most traditional way to make templates. This is something that your team is probably familiar with. If you're coming from Asana. This is going to be eerily similar to your template area. And when you create a template here, you will just save it as a template. And every time you create it, you'll either use that template or maybe just even duplicate a copy that you have in your workspace. Let me speak to that a little bit. Two ways of generating the templates once you save them would be to create a task from template, like I just demonstrated, where you save this as a template, you give it a name. Example template. Do you want to share it with and then you save the template. Once it's saved, you can use that template to create a new task that looks pretty much identical to the one that you saved as a template. You can use this for tasks, lists, spaces, folders, views, all of that good stuff. And once we have it in here, we can just load it. The other way people manage templates, which is just a general thing that could apply to most of these here, is they just have a space called templates, and they duplicate from that space. So you might have this sitting in here that load. And when you're ready to use this template, you would just have your team duplicate this and move it to wherever they're actually working on the thing. Two ways, similar results. There's pros and cons to both method. I won't go into the weeds on that here, but just know that those are the ways that you would generate a template once you create it. But let's talk about the actual methods of the template. This is the first one. And the benefits of this is, like I said, it's intuitive, it's what you would expect to have happen. And you have a whole lot of space to spread out. So by using tasks and subtasks, you have descriptions where you can write a whole bunch of stuff. You have this description area in every single layer of the hierarchy. So I could put videos, embed things, do all the stuff I would normally want to add into text, including YouTube videos like this one, into both the overall task description as well as inside every step. There's another description area where I could type a lot more about how to do this. This is why this is the intuitive way, because it gives you a lot of room to spread out inside each one of these subtasks. You can also add additional checklists, which can be nice for those micro steps that you want to have detailed. This is great. One of the biggest advantages of this method over all of the other ones I'm going to tell you is that we can do these extra things, like I was mentioning before, with dependencies. First of all, we can set assignees, we can set due dates, we can set priorities per level priority, which is nice. So I could have this be due today and the next step be due tomorrow. All of this good stuff to really get granular on project and task management in our template, you can assign them both to me. We can also have dependencies set up where. And again, this is an advanced feature. If you're still new to ClickUp, just cover your eyes on this one or we could have. This cannot be done until step one is done. So we see this is blocking this, this is waiting on something. Why these dependencies are so cool is when step one is complete, I'm going to be notified that step two is ready to go and we'll have that ping to let us know what's the next step in the journey for whoever is the next step or the next person in your relay race of getting things done. This gives you all the options you could possibly need and it's a fantastic way to make your templated processes. This involves text typing stuff in and just creating a step in the subtasks. You'll see I numbered my steps here. I think in some of these I did, some of them I didn't. You want to typically number your process when it has to go in a certain order, because as you can see here, there are different ways to sort. And by doing the numbering method, as long as you're always using a leading zero, so this kind of thing, as long as you're always using a leading 0, using the numbering at the front will ensure that everyone's always clear on the preferred order of doing those subtasks, in case someone might sort it by something else, such as priority, in which case your whole order could get funky and people could know. I don't know where to start, especially when you've got two things that you know look like they could both be done, but maybe they can't be. So that is the first way. I promise the rest of these won't be quite as lengthy. The next way is to use checklists. Again, we're creating one task per template, so we'd probably call this task just like in the other one. We call this our editing process and that would be our template. I'm going to leave it as what it was, though, just for now. We'd rename it and then in here we'd create our entire SOP using checklists, which are. If you click on to do, you can see you can add subtasks or checklists. They're slightly different things. Why would you choose one of these over the other? Subtasks are great because they give you all of that detail, but subtasks are also bad because they give you all of that detail. If you have a simple process and you don't need it to be done, maybe there's not dates for each step. You just kind of need people to go through the process and you want it to be really simple and clear and easy to find. What's the Next step. Sometimes the checklist is the best way to go. Checklists allow you to assign tasks, but don't allow any other additional options. So again, super, super simple. These do feed into the automatic progress of the task if you have that custom field on and they just allow you to have a simpler approach to getting your process done. This would be one example. And if I was doing this, I would probably say, look at the checklist below for our SOP and that's it. Maybe I would add some additional context up here, but our checklist, which we could even save as its own separate template, but our checklist would basically be our SOP here. And we can even add sub steps if needed and check them off all at once so you can see how those kind of nest, which is nice. So the checklist is another option. What's nice about using a checklist is when you reset the task, the checklist reset. They're not separate entities with separate stuff. They don't have the custom fields that tasks do. They're just simpler. I would say between checklists and subtasks, there is one main limit when it comes to checklists is when I'm looking at this space and I'm trying to see, oh, what's due and assigned. To me, those checklists are just far less visible than subtasks, which I could have show up and kind of just pop out for me here. So just something to keep in mind, if you're using this checklist option, you probably want to have this task assigned to the person with the checklist items, just so it's more clear that they have stuff that they need to do there. Okay, so those are the two basic ways. Both of these are probably very familiar to you if you're using ClickUp subtasks checklist. Great. Now I'm going to start going into some of the more funky ways you can do it and hopefully this will be a helpful, helpful lesson. If this is helpful to you, please do give this a thumbs up or a like, depending on where you're watching it. And if you're on YouTube watching this, definitely subscribe so you get more like this. This is not our typical workflow Wednesday, but like I said at the onset, hopefully this will be valuable because I've had a lot of questions about this this week. All right, the other way to create a template in ClickUp, again, one task per process. But the way we would do it is by having a template and having the process live in the description. So this could be using check boxes, which is a Form of a bullet in ClickUp. So you could have bullet number or checkbox. And then we could use the additional writing area to embed additional information. Like you see, I've embedded a YouTube video here, I can write a description here, and we just have the entire thing living in a ClickUp. Description. This is yet another way to organize your processes. What's nice about this is it allows you to have all of the text options. If you're someone that thinks in terms of text, this could be a really nice way to keep things organized because you can really make it feel like a full document. You can even full screen see it there. You can even print it. Something I didn't mention before, but I should have, and I'm mentioning it now, is when we have things as subtasks, it is extremely difficult to print that process. When we have things as checklists, it's fairly easy to print the process. And when we have things as a document or a description, both work more or less the same way. Printing this looks a lot better. And this is probably one of the. We're getting into the nice ways. If you're really concerned about printing your process. Something like this just allows you more formatting. It's going to print out much more nicely than the other ways you could combine these. I just want to be clear. You can mix and match these, but in this case, I've added in an extra step into this process by adding a comment and assigning it to me. So you see, that kind of creates sort of a checkbox here saying, hey, maybe something changed in this process. Hey, I want you to pay special attention to this. And this effectively creates a mini checklist of just a specific comment that was assigned to me. You could imagine we could also add checklists and subtasks and all this other stuff to combine it in here. But here is yet another way to create your process. In ClickUp, you start writing out the steps. You've seen my recent video where I maybe got on a bit of a tirade about how I don't think loom videos are a process. Maybe it's a first step. Totally agree with that. Get it out of your head, do whatever's easiest. But that's not the final state for a process. But if you are developing your process for processes, maybe this description starts with just a video. And then step two, someone turns this into text. And then step three, someone turns this into a template by using a kind of a description method. It can be really nice to let that area evolve while always being able to see your history of what you've added in here. So here is your description. I hope this is helpful to you. If this is helpful, feel free to give me a comment, let me know. So that's the description method. Let's keep going on. The remaining ones involve ClickUp docs. And you're like, wait, we're creating task templates using docs? The reason for that? First of all, yes, the reason for that is because when we use docs, we are effectively creating links in all three of these that I mentioned above. All three of these. We have that versioning issue that I mentioned at the top of the show here, where, where if the process changes, I would have to go through every single copy of this task and update it. Which is fine if we only have two of these active at one time, but if we use these templates to keep track of our orders and there's 15 steps and our orders take two months to do, and we're changing our process once a month or so, that can become really, really overwhelming. The same applies to processes that take a long time. So maybe you only do 10, 10 client orders a year, but each client project takes three months. Well, you're introducing the. You're introducing a lot of manual updating of the process because of the fact that ClickUp relies on this versioning of templates versus something like Process street where it's updating in real time. So these remaining three methods are going to give you a workaround for that if you're someone who has a complicated process or process that lasts a long time and you're updating your process pretty frequently. So the first way is what I would do if I was just myself or if I was working with a small team that I trusted or employees who've been with me for a long time. This is a template with an editable doc either attached to it, linked into it. In this case, I've embedded it. Basically, I've created a doc, a ClickUp doc for the process that I'm working on here. We have a dummy area here. But just imagine this is my template, this is my ClickUp sop. I could have all the same steps in here. I can have my videos, my buttons, my links, all that good stuff in here. And once I have this, I create a public link to this page. So you can see I have that here. Oh, wrong one. This one. We share it. We have a public link to this page. We copy this link. Oh, I lied. That'll be for the non editable. Please excuse me, I misspoke there. In this case we are looking for editable. So recorrecting my brain to add this in here, all we do is create the document like I suggested and then just tag it. So in this case, maybe it's edit YouTube, maybe it's how to make toast. We just embed it here. We can do a full embed like I have above and it embeds the SOP into here. This method gives you an editable doc that whoever's working in this can click on this and as long as they have access to the doc, they can go in here and just amend different things as the process changes. What is nice about this? And I'll explain what I was getting at before later. What's nice about this is that the person doing the process can very easily edit the process as they go, which is a huge help in terms of keeping your sops up to date. So we have this here. You could just leave it at this, especially if it's a pretty simple three step process. Just say use the doc, they click at the dock, it opens up. They can even open it in another tab if they wanted to, because you can have ClickUp open in two windows and work through the process that way.