Beginner Tour of ClickUp FOR GUEST Users

If you're a client, a contractor, or a virtual assistant who is working with a team that uses ClickUp, odds are you have received guest access. Guest access, meaning limited access to work with that team inside their very own ClickUp account. Now, guest access, like I suggested here, is a limited perspective, but something I've found that's kind of challenging for teams when they invite guests like yourself, is that the guests see something entirely different than what the team sees inside ClickUp. And actually just to just to clarify this, right off the bat on my screen you can see, see here I have a guest version of ClickUp on the left hand side. And this guest side is only seeing five different sidebar options as well as search and just a very basic sidebar down here on the bottom. On the right hand side, I have a team user of ClickUp Count, a member of ClickUp Count, rather a member who has full access to ClickUp. And you can see just right off the bat, they are seeing a lot more options here on the right. They have a more expansive Quick Create menu, and they can do a lot more in the tool. Now, the reason I want to make this video and what we're going to cover today is the fact that guests see less and they have less features than team members. But oftentimes when I see teams try to include a guest in their workspace, you as the guest are kind of left to fight for yourself because the team can send screenshots, but your screenshots look different. The team can say do this, but you can't see that thing. So today, what I'm going to go through is how to accept an initial invitation of being a guest in ClickUp, what the differences are in the main features between a guest access and a team member access, and also how you can set up your account for the very first time as a guest user in ClickUp, to make sure that the notifications and those other pesky settings are dialed in exactly the right way. So without further ado, let's just dive in. Oh, and before we dive in, I just want to say that I do have a mini course all about how to get started inside ClickUp in less than a day. So if you're watching this and you're a guest, or maybe you're even a member and you're just feeling confused as to how to work with your team in ClickUp, Definitely check out the description below for the information about the mini course all about ClickUp. So without further ado, let's dive into ClickUp today. All right, so as backwards as it sounds, in order to start our journey into the Guest experience of ClickUp, we actually have to start in the team member experience. So over here, as a team member, I can go into any location inside the ClickUp account and I actually need to invite you, the guest, in order to kick off this whole process. So if your team hasn't already done this, feel free to send them this video. But they need to go into sharing and permissions and actually type in your email address to invite you into the ClickUp account. When they start typing your email address, they'll be prompted to click Next and they can choose what level, level of access they want to give you. I would assume Guest at this point and within Guest, if you're on a paid plan, you can dial in those settings a bit further. Once they click Send, you're going to see an email that looks kind of like this. And this is your invitation into the guest experience of ClickUp. So I can go in here and I can click Accept Invite and it'll prompt me to either log in to my existing ClickUp account or create a new one. If you need to create a new ClickUp account, it's not charging you or anything, it's just asking for some basic information, maybe even a profile picture so your account looks like, like you. Okay, that's enough of the member experience on this Guest Focus video. So we're going to kick off that team member version and we're going to just focus in on the Guest experience inside ClickUp for the rest of the video. So as a guest in ClickUp, your sidebar navigation shows you a few key areas and I want to highlight these in detail because these are where you're going to spend most of your time inside the tool. First step, we have home and this is where you can actually manage the overall projects that you have inside your ClickUp account. Because as a guest, you, you don't have what we would call everything view, meaning a summary of everything you don't have access to that this home is as close as you're going to get to that kind of high level perspective of what is on your plate inside home. And this is the new home released as of February 2021. Here we have lineup which allows you to kind of keep track of your top priority tasks, maybe your top priorities for the day. You might want to put here trending tasks, meaning tasks that you've recently been involved with. They're going to auto populate here and my work now agenda and my work are more or less the same things at certain point, but my work is a lot like my tasks in Asana and my work shows you the summary of all of the other stuff we're going to show you later on. So this is a really great area to make sure that you're comfortable using and that you know how to navigate as you might have guessed just by looking at it. Here, it shows you the tasks that are assigned to you, grouped by due date. Whether they're unscheduled, they're due soon, they're overdue, or they're due today, they're all going to show up here. Similarly, we have all comments. So if you were assigned a particular comment in a task, which I'm going to be showing you soon, no worries, that's going to show up here. Beyond comments you have done and delegated done just show you things that you have finished and delegated shows you tasks that you've actually assigned to another person. I doubt those are going to apply to you here, so I wouldn't worry about them at this point. Just focus on the to do. If there was one place to focus, on the right hand side of your home screen, you have an agenda. Now this is basically the same as today, except it overlays a calendar. So if you want to take your tasks and not just say I need to do this today, but to actually put it on the calendar, you can do that here. And I could say maybe this is going to take my whole afternoon. And there we go. If you're anything like me, odds are you're going to spend a lot of time in this home view particularly focused on the tasks for each day right here. So below home we have notifications and notifications just show you changes to the account and changes to tasks that you are following, which in ClickUp they call watching. But really the whole thing is that you are just involved in some way in a task and so you're receiving notifications. This notifications is more like a newsfeed in say Facebook. It's showing that changes in activity, not necessarily something you have to do, just any change of any kind. Okay? From notifications you can clear those notifications to clean them out, which is what I would recommend you do. And if you want to unclear notification, you can always go under that tab of the menu and wind something back and say, oh, actually I want to look at that notification one more time and it'll come right back into new. You can filter these notifications if you have a whole lot of them, but as a guest I doubt you're going to have that many, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. So you've been invited to a click account, you've accepted the invitation. I want to just make sure that before we dig into anything else, your guest settings are dialed in the way you'd like. So to do that, I want you to go down to the sidebar here in the left corner and go to my settings. So here in my settings you can see your name. You can add your profile picture here by clicking on this image. If you haven't already done so, Confirm your email address and I would recommend at the very first time you log in to Turning on Two Factor Authentication. This is now free for all accounts and as a guest user you want to respect the security of the account that you're in and make sure that you are using Two Factor Authentication in some form. I prefer the authentication app, but if you prefer a text message, that's fine. All this basically does is say when you sign in you receive a secondary notification. Second factor having you confirm that you are indeed trying to sign into the account. This just increases the security and makes it harder for people to pretend to be you and and log into your account by maybe hacking you or something like that. So make sure you turn this on when you're first joining the ClickUp account. Below that you have your color theme not too important, and a few other settings including Time Zone, which you want to make sure that you have correctly calibrated as you scroll down. There's a few other settings that you'll kind of understand as you come across them, so you can adjust some of these as necessary or as helpful to you. But the one setting I want to make sure that you're checking right off the bat is notifications. So in here notifications, I would highly recommend you do turn off email notifications from ClickUp, so you can actually click here to turn off all of the email ones. And while that seems like you turned off all of them, you actually have to go down and do this for each section. But I would just recommend turning off all these emails so that way you are not getting overwhelmed by all of the different communications coming in from the team. Now if there was one email to keep on inside your ClickUp account, it would be this one right here which is the daily Due date summary or Daily Digest email. And with this Daily Due Dates summary email which just rolls off the tongue, you can actually choose to summarize all of the tasks you have assigned to you every single day with kind of one Comprehensive email saying, hey, by the way, you have these tasks due today, this, that and the other, all in one email. So if there is email that you'd like to keep on, if you're an email person, I would keep this one on and turn off all the rest because it can be quite a lot. I think that's enough in the settings space, so let's dive into the actual account itself. Now, just for the time being, I'm going to skip the favorite section and we'll come right back to it. And I want to take you into shared with me. And actually I kind of lied about saying we're not going to look at the team experience anymore because I do want you guys to have a point of comparison here between the team and the guest experience. Because in team over here on the right hand side, if you are a true member of the ClickUp account, members see a thing called spaces here, whereas as a guest you see shared with me. Now, the naming here could be better, but the reason they see spaces is because spaces in ClickUp are the highest container in what they call the ClickUp hierarchy. Now, I'm not going to go into a whole deep dive of the ClickUp hierarchy right now, but I want you to understand why this word spaces is really important. You see, ClickUp is organized in layers. At the very bottom layer are these things called tasks, which are only in the center body area. These tasks themselves live on lists. So like a to do list, pretty easy to remember. Lists, just like on your desk, live inside a folder. So if you have a lot of lists, maybe you want to put them in a folder so they don't become really cluttered. And, and those folders, just like at your desk, live inside a filing cabinet which ClickUp calls a space. Okay, so spaces, if you are someone who's used to physical notes, just think of it as a filing cabinet. Each of these are different cabinets that you can have access to as a team member. As a guest, you do not see the filing cabinet. Okay, so you don't see the actual spaces in here. You only see the exact file or the exact location list that is shared with you. Okay, so I would have to share this individual folder with you for you to see it over here. You are not going to see that is in these different containers. Okay, I think, I think we're on the same page here, but if you have any questions about this, leave it in the comments below. So, long story short, spaces shared with me, both of them are just showing your your tasks in the relevant containers. That are visible to you. I will highlight that Team members have this thing called Everything view and everything shows them the summary of every single thing in their ClickUp account. As a guest you do not see that. However, because you have that home view showing you anything you are assigned to that's that's pretty much just as good. So I wouldn't worry about it too much. But just if you hear your team members talk about everything viewer, I have this thing and everything. The fact is you are not going to see everything view so they need to move it. So for example, if I have this document at everything level as a team member and I want to share it with my guest, I need to move it to a layer that my guest actually has access to. So I can move it here to a folder or a list so that way you, my guest are able to see it. Or I could remove it from any location and just share the doc directly, but that's a whole other thing. So anyway, that is the shared with me area below. That is Dashboards. Inside the dashboards you can see different reports that the team has created for you. As a guest, you cannot create dashboards on your own. And if you want to learn more about dashboards, you can. You can go up to this video, just kind of get the rundown, but you will not be able to create them. They need to be created for you as a guest user. So ask your team about that if you'd like to explore that feature a bit more. Now I said at the top that I was going to skip Favorites for this one, but I want to show you what Favorites is now that we have a little bit of the lay of the land. So both Dashboards and Shared with Me, AKA your tasks can be favorited and Favorites in ClickUp are kind of like shortcuts where you can make connections between your kind of home screen and the places you frequently need to go in ClickUp because I told you about these filing cabinets, you where right these folders. Well, you in your physical office probably keep some folders on your desk because you need to access them all the time. Well, when it comes to favorites, it's kind of the same thing. You can choose to say, ooh, this adulting folder. I am doing a lot so I want to make sure I add that to my favorites so I can jump right to that in one click. So here we can see in the favorites area we now have the adulting folder saved. But because ClickUp isn't exactly as simple as a filing cabinet, there are a few Other things you can also save to favorites. Perhaps we have our adulting list, which if you guys haven't seen the video on adulting, go up here and see my personal productivity folder about organizing your personal tasks in ClickUp. But maybe there's a particular perspective, a particular slice and dice of information that you find really helpful. Now, these slice and dices of information, the different formats of your task, you know, piles versus boards versus calendars, whatever it might be, you as a guest cannot create on your own. However, you can choose a favorite and favorite it. So if you're like, I really like to just focus on published blogs and I love to see them in Calendar view, you can go ahead and save this view to your favorites, give it a nickname if you want, and have that right here. So you can click in one click and go not just to that list, not just to that folder, but to that particular slice and dice of information in ClickUp. And as you can see here, as I flip through the different lists in ClickUp, there are a lot of different views available. That's one of the benefits of the tool is because you can view every single thing in multiple ways if you choose. I just want to call out that if you're a new ClickUp user, these views are just showing me different formats of the same exact data. The stuff in the middle does not change. It's just maybe filtered in one, maybe it's in a different layout in another, but all of these ones across the horizontal hierarchy here showing me the same thing in a different way. So if you're someone that really likes to see things in Board view, well, go ahead and save that to your favorites. So that way it's easy for you to get to that perspective without having to click around a bunch of times. Now, before I go actually into the tasks themselves and give you a bit of the lay of the land here, I will say that there is a help button in the bottom right corner of the sidebar. So if you find yourself needing a little bit more support and you don't want to work with me in the ClickUp community to get all of that stuff worked out, you can contact ClickUp Support here for some more helpful resources also. And I know this is kind of maybe a bit overwhelming, but I want you to know, because I know there's a lot of communications between guests and and members. There is this thing called sidebar layouts, and I have a whole video on it up here, but leave it to say it changes the way this sidebar looks. And if you create account. Today, I believe you're going to see this sidebar layout, but people who created an account a few years back, they're going to see a sidebar layout that looks more like this. And you can see how that kind of reformatted our structure. Even though it's showing the same stuff, it looks like different in this layout. And I just want to call that out, because if you are someone in here and you're seeing that your team members are trying to explain something to you, and you're saying, wait, my ClickUp does not look like your ClickUp, they're seeing something like this and they don't understand why you're not seeing the same thing. Just know that that sidebar settings is there and it might be one of the issues that is preventing good communication between you and the members in your team. This is set per user, not per workspace, not for the entire team. So it's very possible that you and your teammates have different layouts. Don't let that throw you off, though. The content is the same. So I've already given you a bit of a tour of how ClickUp sidebar is arranged, no matter what your layout is as a guest user. But I want to take you inside a task just to be clear that the remainder of the guest experience is more or less the same. So if I go inside a task, which again are these guys here in the center area, I can go inside and I can see pretty much all the same stuff as a member is going to see as long as I have full access as a guest. So just to refresh that one a little bit, back here, when I was inviting people into my ClickUp account, remember we showing you that there are a few different levels of access someone could have? Yeah. So by default on a free plan, when you invite a guest, they get full access, which results in this kind of look of being able to see everything a member would see if the item is shared with me. If I had a limited level of access, such as view only or comment only, or maybe even edit only, I'm going to see slightly less options here. So if you find yourself working with a team and you're trying to click on something and it says you do not have permission to edit, just reach out to your team and know that they may have accidentally set your permissions too low or intentionally low, and you might need to have a little bit of communication about what level of access you need. But back to guest mode. Right. We are inside the task, but assuming I have full access, I have the ability to write comments, to type things into the description, to have to dos and all of those other elements, just like a full member does. As long as I'm a guest with full access, unlike other competitor software, Guest access and ClickUp is actually incredibly generous in what you are able to do. As a guest user, I can do whatever I need to as long as I have permission and access, even though I am a guest user. So as a guest, like I talked about a few different times in this video, you have less access less access to features, and that's kind of the trade off for you being free inside the ClickUp account. One of the features that you do not have that members do is a feature called Clip. So for members in this bottom Quick Create menu, they have the option to actually do screen recordings like loom directly through ClickUp. And you can see that here in the sidebar, as a guest in the account, you do not have that access. Now, these features are not deal breakers for most people, but I just want to highlight them as kind of a downside if you are a guest inside a ClickUp account. So beyond Clip and a few other Quick Create menu options, you're also missing the ability to create docs templates, editing dashboards, creating your own dashboards, creating views, seeing spaces, seeing everything, view access to email and ClickUp. And well, you're also missing billing issues because you are a free member of the ClickUp account, so you're not seeing nearly as many settings as normal team members. So in this video we talked about how to become a guest inside a ClickUp account, how you can calibrate your settings once you become a guest, and how to find your way around the navigation from the guest point of view, which is different than what a member is to going going to see. Now, if any of this stuff sounded confusing or if you'd like a little bit more help, of course, leave a comment below. I would love to hear from you, but also know that I have an online course that helps you get up and running and ClickUp in less than a day in the description below. So if you want a little bit more help, that might also be something to consider. If you enjoyed this video, please do click a thumbs up and leave a comment below. That helps this video reach more people and it costs you nothing. And if you're down there and you like this type of content, be sure to click subscribe. Subscribe as well. I release videos like this twice every week talking about how to build processes inside ClickApp. So until next time, enjoy the process.