This is a short YouTube live-Q&A (hosted by George B. Thomas) answering a viewer about ClickUp workflow design. The presenter outlines two primary approaches to handling cascading dependencies and inaccurate due dates: (1) keep predictive due dates and manually reschedule downstream tasks using ClickUp's rescheduling dependencies when a prior task finishes late; (2) omit initial due dates and instead use an automation that sets a due date when a task becomes unblocked (e.g., set due date = 1 day after unblocked). The video also addresses grouping/sorting limits in ClickUp (you can sort by priority only within a group) and recommends workarounds: create separate views (Priority View vs Context View) or use board view swimlanes to approximate a matrix (group by one field, swimlane by the other). The stream is part of a weekly, client-exclusive series and includes live demonstrations.
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I've said it before and I will say it again. Despite all of the flexibility that is inside the ClickUp Work Management software, it still has a pretty strong bias around utilizing due dates. If you do not use due dates inside your ClickUp account, you'll have some challenges around reporting and seeing what work to focus on. Because by default, in all the default structures of ClickUp, we're still in a pretty due date heavy environment today. What I want to do is talk about ways we can circumvent that and use automations and dependencies to to allow us to have work that kind of goes with the flow. Because despite what ClickUp wants us to do, we all know that sometimes having due dates can be very challenging. Some things are just organic. There can be delays outside of our control. We need to be able to kind of flow with work as it comes to us. And that's kind of the premise of today's question.
How can we adjust the due date? Regarding dependencies and due dates, when we start a list, we list ideal due dates. We also use dependencies where we can move or where we can't move on to a new task until the previous task is done. But many times that means the due date is incorrect. How can I have the due date adjusted depending on when the previous task is completed?
Option number one is to have your beautifully dependent workflow. So you might have these flows here and then if a step gets derailed, like let's say I finished lesson one late and all these are dependent on it, your option number one would just be to change the due dates of lesson two for that. So let's just go ahead to due dates. I know I finished lesson one late, so I'm going to move the lesson to due date one day later and that'll push everything back as long as you have the rescheduling dependencies. Click App on. That's your first option. I think that's pretty nice in the fact that it allows you to predict out when everything's going to happen in the ideal case. And as you do the project a few more times, you should have more accuracy as to your scheduling because you'll be like, oh, lesson one always takes two days, so I might just budget for that. Service providers, like agencies and so on, you'd probably want this kind of flow. Your second option, which is a little bit more fluid, would be to not put due dates at all. This is a radical one, but for some flows it's nice. I've used this in quite a few applications where you Would instead use an automation that says anytime a task is unblocked, meaning the dependency is cleared, set the due date. This basically means your due dates will be blank until you can do the task and then that due date will be something like one day later. This workflow is demonstrated in the YouTube video that just recently went out where I give you a tour of my own ClickUp. In that workflow I show you how I use this inside our own short scheduling area in our ClickUp account. Very nice option for lower priority, non date bound or just fluid flows where having all the dates and the alerts from moving them down becomes frustrating. I hope that helps choose what works best for you and if you need help deciding between them, just give us a bit more context in the chat as to your situation and I can generally recommend which would be better depending on your situation.
Can you sort in a list for priority flags as one section when it's already sorting for custom dropdowns? I may not be explaining that well. As per the screenshot, I want an extra separate task section that pulls the red flags from this list to the top of the whole list from the sections. I'm almost wondering if that's talking like, could it be vus? Would a view work for that?
Yeah, potentially. Let's try to mock this up and get close. So we've got a context field and we've got a priority field. So we've got a little GTD action here. Let's go ahead and add some YouTube stuff here and we will mock this up as best we can. Context, we'll say computer and car and office or so on and then we've got priority flags. So we've got some good stuff going on here. I'm going to delete these subtasks just for good measure. Once we have this, we have it grouped by our context field. Let's put some values in that so we can see it come to life. And there we go. Now the issue is we want to also have the priority flags show up at the top or so I think our challenge is with ClickUp you have two options really that need to be either or or at least in order of priority priorities. So if we group by context we can sort by priority, but only within that section. So let's just say we've got high priority and low priority inside the same section. I can sort by priority and determine which of those shows up first if it actually saves my changes, but I cannot sort between different groups. If I wanted to have things sorted by priority first, I would want to change my grouping, so I'd want to group by priority. So that way my urgent is always at the top. And then I'd want to sort by context. But to have it grouped by both at the same time currently is not possible in ClickUp. What can we do to work around this? Mariah's idea of views I think would be a great solution. The first we would create a view for our priority. We call it Priority View and this could be any layout that we want. And then we'd create a view called context. This would give us two separate views that show us each focus depending on what we want to see in a given day. One will be grouped by context, one will be grouped by priority. An alternative option that would be kind of the same thing would be to use our board view with swim lanes that now allow us to kind of do the same thing. In this case, what I'm going to do is we'll sort it by context. Again, our group by is context and then we're going to add a swim lane for priority. This is an alternative that gets us as close as we can to kind of matrix organization in ClickUp. But ClickUp will always force you to have one grouping first. You can't have two, unfortunately, like always context unless it's high priority. Um, we could get close to that with some dashboards, but I think most often you'd probably end up using multiple views or perhaps this board view if that satisfies this. So maybe we'd even flip it if we'd rather have it grouped by. Let's get rid of that. We'll group it by priority. We could flip this matrix in either direction, but you get the idea. So yeah, for anyone who doesn't know, board views now have swimlanes as of a few months ago. It's a nice little feature. So those are my two cents. If you were someone that wanted to avoid due dates altogether, we could talk about some more flexible ways. As I talk about up in this video with my spouse, who really hated due dates and we needed to get creative. But I hope this is helpful for folks who want to have due dates but still want to balance out that flexibility. Live streams like these happen every single week exclusively for our clients. So if you are someone who'd like to ask your questions or see some of the thousands of other questions we've answered, please do check out the description below where I have information about how you can join us on the inside. I hope this was helpful. And until next time, guys, enjoy the process.
