Automation in ClickUp (Beta) | NEW Feature Overview April 2020

My friends, it is finally here. The Automations module, the friendly robot that really looks more like an alien has arrived. And when you click on it, you will see the wonderful world of automations that are now available within ClickUp. I know. Happy dance. What I want to talk about in this video is just how to find the Automations and kind of the basic give you the basic tour. So that way, if you're new to it, if you're just kind of finding your way around, if you're maybe still confused with ClickUp, let alone Automations give you the lay of the land so you know where to start digging in. Actually, let me say that if you are very overwhelmed, just don't start digging in. This is in beta form, so this will be changing very quickly. If you don't enjoy that process, just opt out and wait a month or two and it'll become a lot more standardized and probably easy to use anyway. So to find the Automations module, the Instructions provided by ClickUp at this point in time say look for the Automation module icon next to the list title, which is great. So I went in just like everyone else, I looked at my list title and I was like, where the heck is it? Not here, not here. There's a million things I don't see. Where is it? Oh, it's actually on the list title within the list view and the list view only. So you can have any kind of list view, any list you have will indeed have that module available. But if you are, say someone that works primarily in board view, you'll notice that it is not here. There is nothing there. So we see. I don't believe it's in any of the other ones as well. So just something to be aware of that you will only be able to see the automation module by going into a list and then opening your list view, which is required. So I know you have it in there, you just got to open that one in order to see the automations. So once you see the Automations and you are delighted to meet your new little robot, forget it. I'm just going to call him Alien. When you're delighted to meet your new little alien friend, go ahead and give him a click on the head and start exploring what's inside. So when we click on it, we see that there are four different buttons available to us. We are seeing that we can click on active Automations, we can add Automations and we have two kind of shortcut automations poking here because ClickUp is aware that this is a very common automation. So they make it super simple and kind of in your face. To add there's also this number three which lets us know the number of active automations we already have. That's the same number that shows up back here in a slightly different shape. I don't know why it's a little squished in that one. Let's go through each one. When we look at Active Automations it opens the Manage tab of the Automations window and here we can see any active Automations that we currently have. We can click Trash to throw them out, which I will. We can also click the edit button to alter them and to change the way that they're working. But before we overwhelm you with that, let's go back to where we were before. We again see our friendly little alien face. We click on it and we want to go to add automation. Look familiar? Before we went to Manage, which is where the active automations took us to show us all of our active automations. When we go to add one it gives us the browse window of all the different pre made templates, the pre made relationships that we can use to jumpstart our automation game. Personally I like to start well let me back up first. Each of their templates are categorized by triggers. So what starts the relationship is what determines what category it's in. So for example dates when due date is this when due date is that. Not a lot with start date in the templates right now, but I'm sure it will be expanded for example when checklists are resolved. Do this. That is what the categories are. They're just helping you get started by giving you some default templates. But do not be disheartened when none of these make sense because you can always add a custom automation down here at the bottom and build yours from scratch which is what I prefer to do just so it's a little bit clearer. So here we see the long awaited Automations window that shows us all the good stuff we'd expect when it comes to automating our business or automating any process. We see two halves with an arrow between to let you know the direction of relationship. We see we've got our if or our when in their case and their then. So our trigger and our action when this situation comes to be have this thing happen. That's basically what this is saying right now. So for example, when our priority changes from any to urgent we want to what do we want to do? Add a comment saying what the heck is going on and we'll Spell it wrong. There we go. We'll do a cowboy hat kind of thing. Perfect. Maybe that's an automation we want to set up. I'm sure that'll be very useful to our team. So we've got our situation, the trigger situation, and then we've got an action. But here's the problem. Maybe we have things going to urgent a lot in our business. It's very common and we don't want to get all of these comments coming through. We don't want this triggered every single time. Maybe we need to narrow the situation that triggers the action. So to narrow that situation, to narrow the trigger, we're going to add extra conditions. The way conditions work in ClickUp is a basic and relationship A N D. When something happens and the status is say active, then do this. See what we've done here? We've narrowed it down. These are and relationships, meaning both of these things need to be 100% occurring in order for this to happen. If something goes to urgent but it is not in to do, then this will not work. Okay, so these kind of clarifying attributes are our conditions. They narrow the trigger to be just pinpointed down to a certain scenario. So again, we can add another condition. Let's say due date is. I don't really like the due date ones. They're a little confusing. Let's say tag. Not any good tags either. Let's say the assignee is not assigned. So if it goes to urgent and it's due, but there's no assignee, no assignee assigned, all of those things are true. If all of those are true, then our action occurs. So again, we are narrowing it down further and further and further by these conditions. Interesting fact here. As of this point, when I was playing with this tool, the conditions seem to be almost endless. I could not hit max on them. So you can really narrow this down really far to ensure that you are getting only the right things triggering. So let's flip over to the other side. Over to the other side of the here and we see the action side. So triggers are what cause the action is, then the effect what happens when the trigger is stepped on. Right. So here we have the add a comment. You'll see I can add additional actions and there's a full dropdown of different things I can do. I imagine this will be changing a lot over time, but for now these are your options for actions. So maybe we want to add a task. I don't really want to add a task. All these are a pain in the butt. To go through and set up as an edit. Let's say, let's change a watcher, let's add a watcher as me, because if something's going backwards, I want to keep an eye on it suddenly, even if I haven't before. We can add up to three actions for each automation. So when this trigger situation happens, we have up to three actions occur. And again, actions are all of the things in this dropdown which you can then search through by typing in or by scrolling through. I'm going to keep it as these two for now. So we've got our. If we've got our then we've got our. When we've got our then whatever you want to call them, trigger and action, we've narrowed it down by condition and then we bring it over here to determine all of the actions that occur and the parameter is the stuff which is like this. What, what specifically, what specifically in that action do we want to occur? And that's what's happening on this side of the equation. A little bit of more context as we're looking at this. You'll notice up here the list that we are operating in is listed in the top left. All of these automations are at the list level at this point, not the space level. So this is only going to be operating, this is only going to be triggered when it's in this space. When the priority changes to urgent. When it's in a to do phase and the assignee is not set, then it's and it's in the space, then this will happen. So keep that in mind. That is an extra almost on a condition that is not really highlighted here in any stage. Here at the very bottom you'll see a weirdly formatted automation summary that gives you in writing what you just set up in the top. The if and then the then. So when priority changes to urgent and conditions are true, I guess they didn't want to write the whole thing out. These are our conditions. When these are all met, then add a comment and add watchers, watchers of me. When we are feeling satisfied with that and I'm feeling pretty good about that, don't know about you, we're going to click Create and it's going to take us back to that normal Manage Automations page that we saw before. Here we can see again all of our active automations. We can toggle them on or off, meaning maybe temporarily for this weekend, we don't want to have this trigger do anything. Maybe we're going to be having a lot of things Trigger to urgent. We just, we want to turn this off temporarily. We can do that. Click out, okay, we're on our way. It says only two or two are active, but when we're ready to turn it on, we can just turn it on and it'll stay on in the background. Hyper aware for whenever that trigger occurs. You'll notice here, while I was clicking through, these quick settings at the bottom show up as automations as well. They're called shortcuts. Basically there's two things, two types of things that they expect to have at the list level to always occur every time a task is created. So here we see Always assign tasks. To me, that is an automation that is set up here at the bottom. It's a little confusing, but it's just a shortcut for something. A very common automation that does not have a specific trigger or condition. It's just always, always in the space. Assign it to me. Okay, so that's in here. We can turn that off by deleting it. We cannot edit this because it is a shortcut template which I'm going to delete. All right. The other tab you'll see here in the automations is the usage and I don't have very many in here, but you'll see I have a business plan. So I have 10,000 actions a month, which sounds like a lot, but it's not a ton. 10,000 instances of an automation. Now notice that this is all subject to change because we're in beta mode, but let me explain what counts as a use of an automation. So here, when status changes, then add assignee. That is my template, that is my process, that is my automation. Every single time that trigger leads to that action. Let's open this up and just look at it. Every time the when happens and the then occurs, that counts as one instance of my automation. So every time my status changes, basically I'm going to be using one of my automation credits and we can keep tabs on those like it showed before in the usage section. The only way to get to usage is by opening up the active automations and clicking over. There's not a shortcut directly to usage at this point in time that I know of. So here we are. And you can always upgrade if you need additional automations. Again, this is all going to be subject to change, so don't hold any of this as sacred. If you were on the free plan of ClickUp, which many of you probably are, notice that you only get 10 at this point, 10 instances of automations which basically means like nothing. So we could have 10 of these triggers and actions happen and then you're done for the month. They reset I believe at the first of the month every month, but nonetheless it's not very much. I believe unlimited plan is a thousand. So again it feels like a lot because we're starting to hear three zeros here. But it's still not very many actions you can imagine. Even this instance in its own could be easily done a hundred times a week. Thousand times a week depending on how many tasks you have in the business. Plan as I described before is 10,000 events, which is what I have here, which allows me to have a little bit more flexibility. 10,000 is probably if you are using this regularly, your team is about what you're going to want to actually make these automations useful and usable, being able to use them day to day. I have a separate video as we're, as we're transitioning here, I have a separate video just giving you some more examples about how to start using these in your business. If you have questions though about it and you don't want to watch the video for some reason, just leave a comment below and we can talk through some of these for your specific business. If you have questions about the manage the usage the how to find automations, leave a comment. Keep in mind that this video is recorded on April 12, 2020. Things are going to change quickly here because it is ClickUp. They iterate quickly and this is a brand new feature so I'm expecting even next week for this to look a little different. So if things are not making sense or not looking the same to you, reach out with a comment. We'll straighten it out and I'll probably be releasing a new video and I'll let you know about it if you leave a comment below. But anyway, that is it for this video giving you the overview of automations. Hopefully it makes sense as to why you why you should start using it if you have a account with ClickUp and why it's not quite a full automation tool yet. Some other videos to check out if you are interested are my video on how it does not replace Zapier yet and my video on how to actually start using this automation features in your business use case. So check out both of those videos and if you want to get updates on new videos coming out talking through these tools. Well you know, gotta say it. Subscribe, click the button on this side or wherever I think it's the side, click the button, the red button and subscribe leave me a comment to say if this video was helpful and just stay in touch so you can keep on top of all of these videos so I can kind of make sense of all the noise and all the new stuff that's coming out at ClickUp in other tools to help small businesses narrow their workflows. So that's it for this video. Feel free to again reach out and yeah, happy playing with automations. See ya.