ClickUp Dashboard Example for Team Management

Once you have ClickUp set up or any project management tool set up, you're really only at the beginning of your ClickUp or project management journey. Because the fact is, having a really nice fancy piece of software is cool until that little factor called people are involved in using that tool. Because people, no matter how well we build our systems, people have a mind of their own. That is the wonderful thing about them. But, but also something that we want to make sure we are kind of cultivating as much as we are cultivating the software that we are using in our business. So for today, I want to take you inside a dashboard that you can build inside ClickUp just to keep an eye on the actual behaviors of your team members. And this isn't something that's meant to be big brothery. This isn't something that's meant to be disciplinarian, really. When we're building ClickUp, we're more so changing the culture of your team. And to change a culture, we need to actually know what that culture is, is. So for this specific conversation, we're going to be looking at things like unassigned tasks, overdue tasks and missed notifications. These are some of the key elements that we can use inside ClickUp to get a sense of how people are interacting with the tasks that we have assigned to them. And if we actually know how people are interacting with tasks, know what their behavior is, we can know what incentives or, you know, rewards we need to put in place in order to encourage the behavior we really need to see, to make the overall system work better. And notice I said system and not software here, because a system is the overall way your process works, while a software is just a tool. So no offense, ClickUp, but you're just a tool. We, we don't ultimately, as business owners really care about the software, we care about the systems. So without further ado, let's go into this software of ClickUp and see how it is helping us make our team adjust to the new system for project management we're trying to implement. So here we go. Here we are inside the team monitoring dashboard in ClickUp with just some demo data from my own workspace. And you're going to notice that all of the different building blocks used inside this dashboard are called widgets. If you're someone that's not familiar with the terms of widgets, or maybe you're just brand new to ClickUp, definitely watch this playlist, maybe after you finish this one here, because it walks through more the fundamentals which we're going to be using for this strategy we're talking about today. So back to the dashboard here. The very first piece is a text widget. This is up here in Widgets and under text block, this is literally just a big old block where we can type whatever we want in it. This particular task widget, its job is to tell us how we know if. If we're doing well or not well. If we're going to monitor something, we need to have a purpose for monitoring it. We don't want to just track numbers or track things for the sake of tracking them. And what this piece does is tell us, hey, how do we know if we're doing a good job? And when do we know if we need to take action? So inside this text widget, we basically define each of the five other widgets and give us criteria for when action is needed and when action isn't needed. And rather than sitting here and reading to you this widget, let's just go through each of the other five and it'll kind of explain why, why this first one is the way it is. So that is our first widget inside this dashboard. This is a text widget, and literally all it is is just some text that we have typed in. So feel free to copy this if it is helpful for you. Next up on this dashboard, we have a who's behind table widget. Under widgets and go to tables, we can go to who's behind and this basically all we have to do is click who's behind, select what spots in our ClickUp account we want to look at, and click Add Widget. There's really not a lot of customization that happens here because this who's behind widget is a prefabricated widget and inside who's behind it shows us each person in our workspace, the total uncleared notifications and the total overdue tasks for that person. Notice, we can also calculate here the average or even the range or even the sum of all of the different people in our workspace. Now, right now, I have this filter to just show me. So, not that exciting, but if you had an average here, that could be a good way for you to be able to evaluate how well your overall team is doing. So average is probably the one that I would use if you're looking for one. Now, this video in and of itself isn't really about new account adoption, but if you happen to be watching this video while you're rolling out ClickUp who's behind widget and this whole dashboard really is an essential piece of that journey. Because during those first few weeks of adopting ClickUp, unclear notifications and overdue tasks are the things you really want to keep an eye on. In my experience, doing ClickUp implementations around the six week mark is when we're going to start seeing spikes in unclear notifications and overdue tasks. And if we have a dashboard like this to keep an eye on these, we can correct that behavior and kind of that loss and shiny object syndrome and we can get people back on track early on before bad habits are formed. And that's really ultimately the goal of this whole dashboard. Correct bad habits before they become bad habits. As it describes up here, we're really keeping an eye on the numbers here per person. This is basically telling us who is working the system and who the system is not working for. If we see more than 100 uncleared notifications, that either means a major system update has just happened and maybe it threw off a bunch of notifications that have not yet been cleared. Or more likely we have somebody that does not know how to use notifications or has just not made it a part of their routine. So if we see more than 100 uncleared notifications in any of the people in this account, including yourself, it is time for an intervention and figuring out some different strategies you can use for how to reduce those notifications and help that person have a more relaxing environment inside ClickUp. What you're seeing here, with about 15 unclear notifications is a really good place to be. If you're around 50, that is still very okay because at around 50 notifications, you can clear them out in about five to 10 minutes. When you get around a hundred, you're looking at spending about 20 to 30 minutes just on notifications. And that's when it just doesn't become tenable and we start to see people drop off the platform. So keep a close eye on this notifications piece. Now, the overdue tasks is another section here, but we kind of talk about that in this other widget. So let's just jump over there and the two kind of go hand in hand. Over to the right we have a bar chart widget that is over here under add widget, custom bar chart where x axis is assignee and our Y axis is the number of tasks. That's how you get a chart that looks kind of like this. Now because this is showing us overdue tasks by assignee and the average in that kind of dotted line you see there, this is ultimately showing us the same thing as the total overdue tasks. But for various reasons, I just find that the bar chart is a little bit more visual, it's a little bit easier to digest. And so I like to have things here just so that it catches my eye a little bit more than if I had just 10 different rows in this table over here. Ultimately, in both of these elements we are looking for the same thing. Is there anybody that has more than five overdue tasks? That's it, five. And that might not be the golden number for you, but for me at least five is a good benchmark. If we see anybody with more than five overdue tasks at one time, we have some kind of problem. In our task assignment system. In the task widget, I've actually listed out three of the most common reasons why we see these spikes in overdue tasks. One, there's too much work, AKA the person is taking on too much, or maybe they took time off and didn't account for that. Two Due dates are too aspirational, meaning we are just putting due dates on the calendar and hoping for the best. If this sounds like you, by the way, definitely watch this video on my own personal productivity workflow because I used to struggle with this too and I kind of found a way around it that I'd love to share. Back to number three. Tasks are too hard to find. The tasks that you are defined piece really comes down to your hierarchy and your use of views. For some reason, people are having a hard time keeping track of what tasks are assigned to them to be able to plan for those tasks and to really even know what is due and what is overdue. Now you might want to look at everything view to solve this issue, but you might also just want to think about the fundamentals of your ClickUp hierarchy. If you'd like to solve, click this issue once and for all. Again, just watch this video. Here we have a video of all of the most common ClickUp hierarchy mistakes which are definitely worth checking out. Now back to the actual dashboard here. Those are the three common reasons for why we see this. But either way, if we see more than five, intervention is needed. And again, these are not Big Brother interventions. This is not discipline. This is not something harsh and cruel. This is literally just sitting down and saying hey Nicole, I noticed you're having a hard time keeping up on the tasks. What are we doing wrong here? That's it. It does not have to be some kind of scary thing. But back to the dashboard here we have three more widgets to go through. Parent Task Missing due dates this is just a task list widget which is one of the most common widgets that I think anyone will be using. This allows you to just look at tasks in a list view from any location in your ClickUp account. You can choose those locations up top, group it by whatever you prefer, and filter it so it only shows the tasks you really care about no matter what you do. I definitely suggest turning breadcrumbs on because that shows you the location of the task as well as the task name. Let me just show you what it looks like here. These guys up here, the action, sprint, whatever. These are our breadcrumbs, this is our task name, and we have a few columns visible here as well, which I don't really need, but you know, it's nice to have them at times. In this particular one I have this filtered so it only shows me tasks where the assignee is set, due date is not set, and the location is not in my idea spot. So for example, my ideas list, my content list, I don't want those to be counted against us here. So those are not included. And I'm also not including any of my done or complete statuses. There's 23 of them here. Just because we do have a a lot of templates and so we have a lot of different versions of statuses. Hopefully you don't have this many, but nonetheless we filtered out the whole sections just by clicking in here and clicking none of the done and none of the closed. So that is that and that's how we get to this result. So you can see here I have to book some travel, haven't done it, keep putting it off and failed to have a due date on it apparently. And so this is a task here that just helps me catch my eye. And if I had the due date column visible again, which I think I just removed, it would allow me to easily go in here, add a due date and get this off of this list. The intervention point for this one is if you have more than zero intervene. And it's up to you how often you want to check this, but I would suggest maybe once a week or every two weeks, go in here and if there's anything that slipped through the cracks for some reason in your task management system, you didn't get that due date assigned to it. Just clean it up here. This is your kind of catch all for something that might have slipped through the cracks otherwise. Now back into the dashboard, we have two more widgets to go through. These are both calculation widgets which are add widget calculation under the featured area or under Custom and then calculation, both in the same spots, both the same thing. A calculation widget basically allows you to pick locations inside ClickUp and as the name might imply, it allows you to make a calculation of some kind using any of the number fields. So we could say the sum of all money, we could do the number of tasks. For most people, the number of tasks is going to be the most important number and the one that you're going to be using most often. Here, if we go below the task field, we can also give it a unit. This is basically the label that goes above or below the actual result. So in this case I might write something like unassigned tasks, if that's what I'm filtered by. Just so it has a custom label. We can choose to include subtasks, archive tasks, close tasks, and so on and so forth. As you can see inside my one here again, we have some fancy filters set up. These are just telling the system that, hey, I don't care about every task. I just want ones that fit this criteria. So in this case that means assignee exists, due date exists, Location is here. But of all of the things, our Sprint points are not there. Now, Sprint points, for my team at least, is the way that we're quantifying how much work we need to get done is part of our capacity defense system. The way that we are tracking what work we're committing to and getting done. It's how we know if we're doing a good job as an operation. Now, for me personally, I want to see a point value assigned to everything that we are doing, either a subtask or or a parent task. These points allow me to know how much effort something is going to take and how valuable the result is going to be. Now, most of you are probably not using points in your workspace and you might use something like time estimate instead. So if you're using that, replace the value I have here of Sprint points and replace it with time estimated. So here time estimate is not set. If I was really concerned about time estimate and that is how I was measuring what amount of work we were committing to, then that would be what I would have filtered here. The important thing is just however you are quantifying your work, make sure that that is what you're checking with this calculation widget. For me, that is going to be Sprint points. And just like the other widgets, we have an intervention point here which is zero. If there are more than zero tasks in this area, we need to do some intervention. And the reason we have 27 there's actually a reason for that, so I'm not too worried about that here. But that is our intervention point, the moment where we want to start intervening and making sure that no behaviors or issues are coming up. Similarly, in the next calculation widget we are checking for a different thing. So this is kind of the inverse of before. Whereas this is everything is good except for the points. This one is telling me everything is good except for the assignee. But what this is checking for is just another type of failure of the system. So for you, if you were using time estimate and that's how you were measuring work in your business, you might have something where, where assignee is not set and due date is set and time estimate is set. Again, we are just checking for failures of the system here. We want to keep these as zero, but it's just helping us catch potential areas where there might be a mistake. Now just to give you one more example for these calculation widgets for how you might customize it based on your actual business needs, you might look at something like this. Rather than unassigned tasks with points, maybe we want to just look at tasks that are done where time tracked is not set. Because if I was a business that really cared about time tracking, I want to make sure that every complete task that's not an idea or in some kind of other database style area, every task that is actually a task should have time tracked. And this might be a valuable calculation widget for you. If you went ahead and did this. You might want to change the title of this widget and also change your label here to make sense for you. And clearly we don't use time estimates here, but that would be one more calculation widget you might create. Because ultimately this dashboard, the monitoring that you're doing should reflect the rules you have for for your organization. Now that pretty much wraps up this walkthrough of the team monitoring dashboard. As you can hopefully see, this should help you get your team on track with the system you are trying to build by actually using a software to help you do it. But remember, a system is not a software. Two separate things. Now, if you are a member of Clickingup and you're watching this video, I just want you to keep in mind that this ties into the capacity defense lessons that we teach inside ClickingUp. And if you are not a member of ClickingUp, you can consider joining. Because one of the elements inside the course that we teach, which is an element of the membership, is talking about how you can estimate workload by finding a way to measure it, and systemizing your actual way to take ideas into actual tasks you are committing to. So if you're someone who's looking at this dashboard and thinking, wow, that'd be really nice, but you don't actually have a system in place for figuring out how much work you're doing and for tracking that you don't have those rules. Well, this dashboard is not going to help you, because this is just enforcing the systems that we've designed elsewhere. So if you'd like help with that, check out clickingup in the description below. But otherwise, I hope this is a helpful video for you guys. Feel free to copy this dashboard if it helps you. And if you're a Clickingup member, you can see this inside our dashboard example vault inside the membership. But otherwise, thank you so much for watching, and until next time, enjoy the process.