ClickUp Folder vs. List vs. Task | Organize in the ClickUp Hierarchy
Kyle explains how to organize ClickUp projects using folders, lists, and tasks. He covers when to use each level based on team size and project complexity, helping you structure your workspace effectively.
I feel like one of the most common questions people have about ClickUp is what level of the hierarchy should I build at? But they don't phrase that question that way. It's something more like I work with clients. Should they be folders or projects or spaces or I have chores? Should they be tasks or lists or I operate multiple businesses? Should they be workspaces or spaces or folders or lists or tasks or, you know, or tags? Those are how the questions are phrased, but the intent is the same. How the heck do you do I put my information into ClickUp? What level of the hierarchy of the layers should I build at? Fact of the matter is there's not a right answer, and you probably know that. That's why you've probably watched a bunch of videos before you stumbled onto this one. So in this video, I'm not going to tell you that there's one right way and one wrong way based on.
The type of information.
It's completely dependent on your team type. But I am going to walk through three specific examples with the exact same information organized at three different layers of the ClickUp hierarchy. So I'm going to take the example of a client project and build it.
Out as a task and as a.
List and as a folder, and show you how it feels and functions differently at each of those layers. By no means is this going to be an exhaustive tutorial, but I'm going to do my best to help you feel the difference relatively quickly so you can make a decision as to which layer of the hierarchy you'd like to.
At least start out with trying. So without further ado, let's just dive right in. First things first, here we can see that I have just let's orient ourselves around ClickUp just so our terms are all clear for everybody. So here I am looking at the list called web Design projects, and I have a task for all of my clients. There's also some different views where I can view the same exact information in multiple ways. So the same five clients in list or a board view, as well as a variety of other task views. If I wanted to have totally random information not related to the tasks in this area, such as an overall like bad talk our clients chat. If we want to just have a place to just talk about all of these design clients. What we could have a chat view, which is a form of a page view that is different than task. It does not show anything related to the tasks. It just happens to be stored in the same place. So those are our views. These are our tasks and these are our lists. If we wanted to collect lists into a group, we could create a folder. Folders allowed us to create a collection of lists that we can then group under one folder. And all of this stuff we just talked about is living in a space which again, we can collapse and expand. We can have multiple spaces, just like we can have multiple lists. So the way the ClickUp hierarchy works is that things kind of collect under these headers. So when I click on clickup101, you will see everything, every single thing that's contained within it in one really long scrolling list, which is generally overwhelming, but maybe it's helpful to you. You also see a summary of any docs or chats that we have, including our bad talk chat we just added. If I click on the folder, I will see everything within that folder, all of the lists contained within it. If you. If I click on the list or any individual list, I will just see any tasks within that list, and so on and so forth. So that's kind of the ClickUp hierarchy 101. We've got our terminology, we've got our tasks, our lists, our folders, our space. And I didn't talk about, but it's here, your actual workspace, which is most likely to be your company name down here in the corner. If you're working with multiple companies as a freelancer, you'd probably be clicking down here a lot to switch between them.
So that's the basic hierarchy.
But what really trips people up when it comes to ClickUp is deciding what becomes what part of the hierarchy. Because as I spoke about here, these are just kind of nested folders each. You know, you've got information that sits inside of information, which sits inside of information, which sits inside of information, which sits inside of information. There are a lot of layers that you can choose to build out when it comes to ClickUp. And deciding whether this homepage task should be a subtask, a task or list, et cetera, can really trip you up. So what I want to show you in the remaining portion of this video is an actual side by side comparison of the same exact information mapped three different ways at three different parts of the hierarchy. My hope, by illustrating this is not to prescribe that one way is the best. You can't always. In this example, I'll use a web design project. Not all web design projects should be lists or folders. It depends on how complex the project is, how much detail you're trying to track, and even the size of the team, how Much autonomy does each group have as to which one's right for you. But hopefully this will help you at least feel what it'll feel like to build at different levels so you can make the decision for you. And of course, if you're working with us, if you're a client of ProcessDriven, we'll be working through this together so we can talk through this live as to what the best recommendation is for your business.
So here we can see.
I'm going to start off with the folder level and if you use some of the default ClickUp templates, you'll find that they often are recommending folders for these types of projects just as part of the templates that are pre built. Let's imagine we have a web design project for CNT Pancakes. We're a web designer, right? And our web design process, we have a lot of moving parts. And so here we see all the projects we have going on right now. And if I click on CNT Pancakes, not plumbing, we see that we have a subtask for each page. Again, same information, different level of the hierarchy. If I go to the about page, I can see all our punch list of things that we need to do. I cannot give a due date to these specific things because this is a checklist, not a subtask. Let me just explain that a little bit more. Once again, here's a task. These are subtasks. Subtasks cannot have subtasks, so we can only do checklists here. So these checklists can give an assignee, and that's pretty much it. You can have a due date for the overall subtask, but you cannot have it for the specific things. Things down below here. If I was a one woman show, and I'll just add this as an example here. If I was a woman show and I made all my own web page. Again, same information, different level of the hierarchy. If I go to the about page, I can see all our punch list of things that we need to do. I cannot give a due date to these specific things because this is a checklist. Checklist, not a subtask. Let me just explain that a little bit more. Once again, here's a task. These are subtasks. Subtasks cannot have subtasks. So we can only do checklists here. So these checklists can give an assignee and that's pretty much it. And you can have a due date for the overall subtask, but you cannot have it for the specific things down below here. If I was a one woman show And I'll just add this as an example here. If I was a woman show and I made all my own websites, I was doing everything in house, didn't have a lot of complexity. I would probably keep it this simple for, for my web design process. I'm just going to be candid with you here because it allows me to create a very simple place to know where to look to see how things are going. I can just kind of cross things off as I go like to show what's completed but and I can just see kind of how is the about page looking. And in one task, in one place I can see what is all the stuff that's been happening with this project. Any notes they didn't like, any notes I might have about the project. I could see a historical record all here. I, I wouldn't need to go in multiple places because I'm just one person. Simple is okay for me. Here we go. And what's nice about this is because the custom fields are at the task level I can see my budget and whether or not they paid and my overall progress which is auto tracked all in one place. Which as a business owner I like having that all in one place if I'm both doing and selling and you know, the business owner on everything. And again I can expand the subtasks here and see all those details per day page. I hope I didn't trip anybody up here. So I'm going to go up a layer and we're going to talk about where this could be really good, this level of detail where we have a task per page and either a subtask or a checklist for the things that go into that page. This is probably where I would, I would recommend for a slightly larger team, maybe an agency where there's certain websites, web pages that you have a certain designer working on. Maybe one designer is in charge of all of the about page but you have someone else working on the homepage or, or maybe you even need to hide, you need to hide a page. So that way only you can see if that page exists. Because you're working on it, you don't want anyone else to see it. If you need more privacy, more compartmentalization and more details when it comes to time tracking and, and so on. This might be the better next step going up to the list level. What this lets you do is like you see here you've got all this different stuff going on and you can really drill down in the comments just talking about a specific piece of the puzzle with maybe Just one contractor who's only doing the header image and. And nothing else. One note about collaboration here. Subtasks and tasks for collaboration are great when you're okay with someone being able to see everything in the subtask at this point in time. ClickUp's privacy basically says that if I'm allowed to see a subtask, I'm allowed to see the whole task. So if you wanted to delegate just a piece of this puzzle to one person and not let them see anything else at this point, this method might be a little bit too small for you. Because if I were to share this banner image task and I were to assign it to somebody else, that person would also be able to see all of the other things going on in this project. For smaller teams or for teams that are a little bit more flat or working with more people in house, that's probably great. You want people to know what's going on. But if you are looking to delegate something to another person, you don't want to have to copy and paste it. You want to keep it all in one big spot. That's when we're looking at the next layer of the hierarchy. So we're going to pop up here to the. We're looking at homepage. Let's go up to the homepage here.
If we were to break out every.
One of those little tasks into their own task, now all of a sudden we have even more options when it comes to subtasks and checklists and privacy and sharing, because at the task level is where we can set that privacy. So if I wanted to only share this with myself, I could go ahead and do that, and then that particular task would only be shared with me and no one else would be able to see that it's there. If I want to delegate just the website illustration to one other person, I could assign it to that person. They would receive the assignment. They would not see anything else going on any of these other tasks that are related to the project, which could be good if you're really looking to have things compartmentalized. I guess there's not a whole lot more to add here other than to experiment. This is very much just a primer to help you feel the difference between the different structures. The big pro con between different layers is going to come down to how much detail you need and how. How open you want your communication to be. One piece, I will say, is it's better to skew simple than skew complex, especially if you're new to task management tools. As you can see here. It'd be really nice if CNT calls me up on the phone to be able to pop open their information and say they called and hated the draft and everyone who's working on this project, since they'll be in this task, they'll be able to see this and they'll be notified about this. But if I'm over here and I'm in the list, well, that's also true. I can go in list info, I can go over here and leave a comment at the list level, said they hated the draft and that'll communicate with everybody who is in this list. Great, right? And for the other layer, the highest layer of the hierarchy here, we can have a chat widget up here and it looks like there actually is one. We could say they hated the draft. I'm sorry, there's a typo in that one. I'm not going to change it. And that's great. That does work pretty well. But what happens when we are working in the weeds here and my only job is motion graphic and I didn't see your comment over there about they hated the draft. I'm so focused on motion graphic by creating all these different cards, all these different places that you have to click in to work on things. It can be pretty easy to lose track of big picture stuff unless you have a larger team, perhaps with a management layer already in place just to keep on tabs of everything or keep on top of everything rather, because it's just a lot of details. It's a lot of clicks to go in and really see the status of everything because you've built out so much structure. So I'm going to leave it at that for today. I hope this was a helpful illustration. I know it might have gone a little bit too in the weeds at moments, but I wanted to help you feel the difference between these three layers, which I'm going to review once again. Here we have our folder level where we have the actual a folder per client, a folder per project. We have a page of the website as each list. Underneath we've got a folder per type of project where we have the client as a list in that folder and then we have the task per client where we have everything involved in the project. I should actually say be web design, although that can be assumed, and then all the pages below that. Best practice depends on team complexity, custom field needs, date, due date needs, and other functionality based on how your team works.
Okay, so that was the training. If you're interested in seeing more videos like this if this like resonated with you. If you're like, oh yeah, that was really cool. I wanted to encourage you to check out the System up program. The System up program is my private.
One on one 12 week program where.
I work with small business owners who are trying to build out more systems and processes in their business. So everything has its rhythm. Nothing is being invented and reinvented on the spot.
You have a set structure for your.
Business and that's all organized within ClickUp. If you are tired of trying to piece together YouTube videos to help this stuff make sense, and you want to make ClickUp the hub of your business operations and build that business instruction manual in ClickUp up, be sure to reach out at ProcessDriven co.
