ClickUp for Individual Contributors [The Ultimate Guide]

In this video, I'm going to walk you through the best practices when it comes to being an individual contributor inside of ClickUp. So if you're someone that works at a company that uses ClickUp and you're looking for different ways to really optimize your productivity, just work in the system a little bit better and really understand ClickUp more overall, then this is going to be the video for you. But before I jump too far into how to best use ClickUp as an individual contributor, I want to take a look at a higher level to really understand the resourcing flow to how you'll actually get your work as an individual contributor. So at zenpal, essentially the way that we look at this in terms of the resourcing flow, in terms of how work flows in and out of the ClickUp system that we're creating here is essentially you have three main roles here that are all working together to make sure we're getting work done quickly and efficiently and providing good results for our clients. So the way that we look at this is one on the high left hand side here we have the demand seat. And so that's really your account manager. So your account managers are the ones here that are actually working hand in hand with your clients, building that relationship, understanding their objectives, their goals, and then taking those objectives and goals and turning them into a strategy of how we're actually going to get to that point to hopefully exceed their expectations to see the goals that they have. So your demand side, the account managers, again, are the ones that are actually thinking about what that work is that we actually need to put into the system to help our clients be successful. And so on this side, again, that demand seat is working to get that work and into the system. In addition to that, they're working hand in hand with your resource seat here or the project managers who are the ones that are taking, then working with those account managers to say, hey, we can realistically get this done at this date because of the capacity and work that we have on the team already scheduled out. And they're going to be shifting timelines, shifting due dates, things like that, to make sure that we can actually give realistic expectations and timelines to those clients. And then in addition, your project managers are always obviously also going to make sure that we're sticking to that timeline that we've set as well. So these two seats together work to get the work into the system so that you here at the bottom in the fulfillment seat, worker B individual contributor, are able to understand what you need to do how you need to do it and essentially when it needs to be done by. So you're going to be working with the account managers here to really get that shared context into those deliverables. So you might know that you need to write a blog post or write some ad copy or design a thumbnail or something like that, whatever that task may be. But you also need to understand really what's the why behind that? What is the client expecting, sort of what is all that additional context that you need to make sure that you go do that task and that you don't have to do it over again because you did it wrong for the clients, we need to make sure that we're working with the account management side, the demand seat here, to get all that context that we need. In addition, we also need to work with the project managers to really understand what work we need to do and then when we need to do it by. And then if we need to shift a due date or something like that, because we're not able to get to it, we need to communicate with the project managers there as well. So that's really the fulfillment side, the individual contributors, worker bees. All the work is going to be given to you from those two different seats for the most part. You might have some ad hoc tasks that come in here and there, but that's essentially how you would work with the rest of the team. And now looking at that, let's now dive into ClickUp to really understand how we can best do this as an individual contributor. And so a couple of things before I get too far into the weeds here is once you get into ClickUp, sort of for those beginners that are jumping into a system, a few things that you're going to want to do is go through really your personal settings to make sure it's all set up the way that you want. So what you're able to do, again, if I get into click up here, I can come over here to my profile and you'll see a bunch of different sections here. One is the profile, two is themes, and then we have settings and notification settings as well. So I like to jump into themes because Themes is really whether you're a light mode person or a dark mode person. You can adjust that however you want, as well as the overall theme and the color scheme that we have here. So whether you want it to be light mode as I have here, or I can also switch this dark so we have a little bit more contrast there. It's not hurting my eyes as much, so feel Free to adjust that as well. And again, obviously, you can change this theme here, which just kind of adjusts the colors on click up there as well. So that's one thing that you can do. In addition, we can go through our settings too, just to make sure everything is set up correctly. A couple of things I want to point out here are mainly a couple of these different preferences that you can turn on or off. So one of the biggest ones is going to be hotkeys, essentially. Hotkeys. Some people love to use them, some people don't love to use them as much, but hotkeys really allow you to do things quickly inside of ClickUp. So you'll see some of these listed over here in the keyboard shortcuts. But things like creating a task. I can essentially just click T on my keyboard, which allows me to bring up that task menu. Or I can click S on my keyboard to pull up the search menu. Different things like that. I can turn on hotkeys if I want to be able to do that. However, some people get a little frustrated because they accidentally click that key like a T or S, and it kind of pops that up when they don't actually want it. So feel free what your preferences are, but that is a big one, Hockey. So feel free to either turn it on or turn it off, depending on how you want to use that. But there's a couple other things here as well. Not as an important. That was probably the most important one there, but again, you could turn some of these preferences on or off. After you do that, just make sure you go down to the bottom and click Save there as well. Um, but one other very important piece to this, whenever you go to set up your ClickUp account, is you want to make sure you go through your notification settings. So this is probably one of the most important things here, because the way that we like to use ClickUp and the way that's going to be best to make sure that again, all these three seats can work well together, is we need to make sure that we are communicating and creating ClickUp to be our single source of truth. So if you want to make sure that you have a detailed task list every single morning of what you need to do as an individual contributor and that all the communication and everything is happening in one place. We need to make sure that we do things like setting up our notification settings and build healthy habits as an individual contributor just to make our lives a lot easier. So one of the biggest things that I'll recommend, and this is actually a little bit easier inside of ClickUp now and I also have a whole more detailed video on this as well that goes through all the notification settings, how to use your inbox, things like that. I'll drop that in Description below if you want to watch that. Just to really understand how to use notifications, how to set them up correctly, as well as how to use the inbox overall inside of ClickUp But a few things that I'll give you here. One Again, this is a little bit easier than it used to be because now they have sort of ClickUp created some preset options here for you. But what I like to do is essentially in my inbox I actually like to leave this as default. I find this to be fine. In terms of the notifications that I'm actually going to be getting inside of ClickUp again, I like to keep them all on the inbox. So as you'll see, I actually turn email off. The reason that I do that is because if you've ever jumped into a system before, a project management system especially, and you didn't turn the email notifications off right away and you got assigned to a bunch of tasks, people are leaving comments and things like that inside of that project management system, there's a chance that your inbox got completely flooded with emails from your project management system. So for that reason I like to leave everything inside of Inbox here, which is my ClickUp inbox inside of ClickUp instead of getting email. So I like to completely get rid of those. Disable any notifications browser if you want to have these up depending on sort of how you work, if you get distracted by little sort of browser notifications popping up like maybe a Slack message would and they have that little noise and things like that, you can turn those off unless you really want them. And then mobile is also another one that unless you're using the mobile app, I also disable those notifications as well. So I would leave Inbox on on the default email I would turned off a browser. If you want to turn this on, you can just make sure you allow those notifications on your browser as well. You can leave those in the default too. And then mobile I turn those off. I don't want to have those notifications popping up on my phone. Want to have a good work life balance there. So I turn those off again unless you're working on the mobile app there then. In addition, you can also integrate Slack if you want to. I won't go over too much detail there, but feel free to connect to your account if you'd like to do that, to pass some notifications back and forth between each different system, they can also go through these general settings here as well. But again, I have a whole nother video that dives into this a lot further if you want to watch that, but wanted to give a brief summary and overview for that. And so those are really the main settings that we need to go over. Make sure you get all of those set up and then you'll be good to go. And so now as we jump into ClickUp, probably the one thing that's on your mind is maybe if you've been in here for a while or not so long, the ClickUp can get a bit overwhelming because of the amount of different things that you see on your screen. So obviously, yeah, I have this menu here, I have this menu here and all this menu up here. So there's a lot of different buttons and things that I can press. And it can be very confusing because there's a lot of tasks and things in the system, especially if you have a pretty large company that you're working for. So as you'll see here on the left hand side, this is actually our hierarchy that we have set up. We have sort of spaces, we have folders, we have lists, and then we have in these lists we have tasks and then we have subtasks. These subtasks can have checklist items and different things like that. And so it can be very confusing because you're sitting there and just want to know what work is assigned to you. You don't want to get lost having to navigate to all these different places to go ahead and find all of that work. And you just are worried about really what is on your plate. And so in terms of the hierarchy and how it works inside of ClickUp is at each of these different levels, they all have different views at the top of your screen here. So as you can see, this list has different views, this folder has different views, this space has different views as well. And then even when I go to the everything level, which is gonna show me work across all of my different spaces that I have in here, this is also gonna have views at the top here as well. And so what's really cool about ClickUp and the way that it works is that you can create views again at any level in the hierarchy and then I can fill filter those views down to really only show the work that I care about. And so in terms of how this works inside of ClickUp, again, you're going to have both of Those account managers and project managers actually going into the system here inside of all these different spaces. And so as you can see here, I have a delivery space with folders. These are my client folders. And then all these lists are really sort of those contracts and those projects that we're doing for our clients. And so that's where the work is actually going to live. You might be assigned to a task that's for HannaFord in this ABM project that we have going on. You might be assigned a task in the food line here, but you might also be have a task in the operation space or growth space. So your work is probably all over the system and you don't really need to worry about that as much if your account managers and project managers and other people are setting up that work for you. Because again, account managers are working on the strategy, project managers are working on the timeline, and they'll be able to go in and get all the work set up just like this with all the parent tasks and subtasks right there. And so in addition, the way that this is laid out in terms of our methodology, especially at Zimpilot, is the parent task is going to represent the deliverable that you're doing. So in this case, as you can see, Google search campaign, we're doing a grocery stores NPA campaign for Hannaford there. And then all of these different subtasks are going to be what is actually assigned to you as an individual contributor. So maybe you're identifying the keywords in landing pages, maybe you're updating the paid search setup document, maybe you're going through round one of the ad copy, maybe you're reviewing that ad copy, whatever it may be. These are actually the actionable steps that you, as an individual contributor will be assigned to. And so the way that this works too is all that work can be passed back and forth between different people. As you see here, we have a task that that's assigned to someone. Each of these has a due date of when that needs to be done. They all have time estimates as well of how long this should potentially take. Based off of our estimate, that's going to help populate your workload view as an individual contributor to make sure people know, and especially that project manager knows that hey, you have two hours and 30 minutes that is applied to today. So we need to make sure that that's filled up on your particular workload view to know that, hey, you don't have a full capacity that you can actually take on any more work if that's going to populate that whole eight hours of your day. And so, as you can see, y all of our work here is in the system like that. It's all categorized in these different sections, in these different lists, within these folders, within all these spaces. But again, I don't want to have to go find all my work by diving into all these different workflows here. And that can be very confusing and it can get me lost. And so the beauty of ClickUp now is the ability again, to not worry all about these different places where all that work is living, but just create a detailed view where only my work actually lives. And so there's a couple of different ways that you can actually go and find that. And so the first option for you, and this is where you'll probably live out of, is going to be your home screen. And so your home screen is a customizable place for you to go and just set up really your. Your section of your ClickUp workspace where you're only going to see what actually pertains and matters to you. And so you can put a bunch of different cards on here as well, if you want to adjust these too, to put in sort of like a different widget in here if you want to see, as you can see, like an AI standup or section for your work, or a personal list, or assign comments to you, different things like that. You can actually go ahead and set that up if you want to. However, I have a couple of different cards that I have set up here. One of them is recents. Essentially what that is, is giving me the ability to just kind of go to places that I've been in ClickUp before, like very recently. So if I wanted to navigate back to a list that I was just in, I could easily click that and, and navigate back to that list, or even if it was a task or a document or something like that. This just shows me the recent places that I visited inside of ClickUp, which can be helpful. In addition, I also have an agenda card. And so one thing you can do with here is if I go to more settings, I can actually connect my Google Calendar if I want to. So as you can see here, I can add a calendar. If you go down to the bottom to add one and just make sure yours is turned on. So essentially what that does is this allows me, if I have work assigned to me on a daily basis, I'm actually able to go ahead and schedule that work here inside of this calendar, so you don't have to do it but what that does is it's going to take all of those maybe meetings that are on your calendar. If you have those all set up on your Google Calendar, your time blocks, whatever it may be, and then I'm able to actually take any tasks that's assigned to me and put those right next to on my calendar. So it's not necessarily going to then put that on my Google Calendar. It's not really a two way sync like that. It's essentially just going to show me what sort of events I have on my calendar. And then I can take like if I have a task here, apply blog proofing revisions, I can actually drag that down here. And if I want to plan out my day each and every morning, I'd be able to do that. And I can kind of spread that out here as well just based off how much time that might take. So again, right blog copy, let's say that takes a little bit longer, like an hour or so. Again you'll want to use that time estimate. I can use that to be able to sort of block that time out here for me to say, hey, this is when I'm going to do it. There's actually a really good integration with Morgan that you definitely want to check out. This actually has sort of that two way sync where you can actually be in your Google Calendar and see your ClickUp tasks and actually track time and things like that directly there. So I highly recommend you check that out. But essentially what this does is allows me to again just plan my work. If you want to have sort of a morning routine where I come in and get that all planned out, you're able to do that, which we'll dive into a little bit more about that later on. But that's one widget or card I highly recommend you get built into here. And then lastly, one of the most important ones is actually gonna be the work that is assigned to you. And so what this is is this is actually a customizable card here that I can add a bunch of different columns. It's. It's basically like a view that you were seeing over here in one of these different sections like this. Basically just a basic list view like that where I can see a bunch of work in one place. But with this, the cool part about this is what it's doing now is it's ignoring all of these different places over here and ignoring all the tasks that might be a little bit busy. And it's basically just showing me exactly what I need to focus on. It's just Showing me the work that's assigned to me. As you can see, just the assignee. This is the only work that me, as an individual contributor, I really need to worry about. So I'm able to take this, I can group this all by due date. That way I can see the overdue work ahead of today's work and then tomorrow's work and into the future there as well. I'll want to make these subtasks as separate tasks. As you can see, you have a couple different options to either expand those, collapse all the subtasks, which we want to keep those as separate tasks. If we're working out of subtasks, which in this system we are, all the work that we're being assigned to is most likely going to be a subtask. And then in addition, we can also filter this down by specific locations as well. So if I just wanted one grow space, delivery space, and operation space, I'd be able to filter that down for me as well, just to see the work that's being applied and assigned into those specific areas. And then in addition, you also have a couple of different customization options. One, you can add different columns to this or custom fields, whatever you like to do there. As you can see, I can add like an assignee field. I can add the priority field here. I can add the due date there. I can actually add the time tracker, which is great because then I can actually go ahead and track my time directly on all these tasks very easily. If I just click that and start the timer, I'll get to that in just a moment. Can add time, estimate comments. But again, you can add all the different columns that you want, whether it's a custom field or just a native ClickUp field in here. As you can see, if I just turn that on, we have the date created, shows up over there. I can go ahead and I can hide that as well if I don't want to see that anymore. And I can drag these over whatever sort of way you want to put those, could put them in a certain order. Again, you can customize this as much as you want, just to make it so that it fits your workflow and how you want to work inside of ClickUp. And one other thing too, dimension here. When you go to customize, you can also go to layout options. And I find this to be super helpful. One thing you're going to want to do is I do like to wrap text if you want to do that. Nothing super crazy there, but a couple of things that are going to be Important are task locations. As you can see here, I have breadcrumbs to where a task actually lives. If I were to turn that on, as you can see, or turn that off, as you can see now, those are a little bit hidden. I can also show the subtask parent names. Again, this makes it a little bit more confusing, but if I show the subtask parent names now, I know this subtask is associated with this parent task which represents the deliverable or the project milestone, as you can see here. Like a blog, blog, blog. Proving revisions is for that blog post. Best grocery stores in America. But then if I turn on the task locations, that's then going to show me, okay, we're doing blog proofing revisions for this specific blog post for this client in that sort of client list there in this specific space. That's a great way to show me, okay, where does this task actually live? It's living here in the Hannaford ABM 2024. That's sort of the contract retainer that I'm doing this for. That's for Hannaford the client. And that's for our delivery space. So that's just a great way to show you those breadcrumbs. They can click on each of these two to navigate to that location as well if you want to. And so that's your home view. Again, this is where you're going to be working out of mostly. One other thing I'll recommend, and it really depends, again, this is all your personal preference on what you to be easiest. The other thing that you can do is if you don't want to have all of these different cards and maybe this gets a little bit distracting to you. What you're also able to do is at the everything level because again, at the everything level, essentially what that's doing for us is that's going to show us work across our entire ClickUp workspace. And I can filter this down to again, just show me maybe the work that's assigned to me. And so what I can do here at the everything level is I can actually create a view and I can call it my tasks. And so it's going to be pretty similar to what we were seeing in the home view. Essentially all you would do again at the everything level is create a list view just like this if you wanted it to be any different. You could also do that too if you had a preference on the way you like to view your work. But I can create a my tasks view. I'm going to group it by due date Similar to what I did before in that home view, I'm going to make sure those separate tasks are separate tasks as well. I'm going to adjust my filters, I'm going to make sure the status is not a closed status, unless you want to see all your closed work, which you don't necessarily need to, once you close it, disappear from this view. And I can also show where the assignee is me. You'll see I can either use me mode or me. Me mode is just dynamic to whoever logs into this specific view and is looking at it in their account that'll be kind of dynamically updated to just again see their work there. So either me mode or me both will work for you. And then I again, I can navigate down to just specific locations if I want to as well. And so one other thing you can do with views too is if I wanted to Every single view that you create in your ClickUp workspace is going to be visible to everyone in the workspace unless I come here and actually make this a private view. So if I wanted to make a private view, I'll just kind of show you what that would be. If I created a new view, go like this, create a list view. And then if I wanted to, if I came here and I privated the view just like that, what that does now is that makes it so that no one else can see this view except for me. And so again, if you're creating views and ClickUp, everyone else can see it unless you private that particular view. And you'll know it's private based off of that little lock that you're seeing right there. And so let's actually go ahead and unprivate that view now. As you can see now it's visible to everyone else in my workspace. We don't need that one, so let's go ahead and delete it. But again, that's my my test view again, the same thing that you did earlier. You can also add columns to this as well. So I can actually go show hide specific fields inside of ClickUp that I wanted to put put here. As you can see, I have my time tracker assignee, the due date, priorities, time estimates there, comments, so on and so forth. All of that is going to be living there for me to see that as well. Then in addition, as I mentioned before, the customize options can also be the same as we were looking at the home view. So if I wanted to show the task locations and the subtask parent names, that's going to give me the Breadcrumbs, as we can see there. So that's kind of another preference that you have if you want to do that. The cool part about this now too is I can actually go ahead and fill favorite this view. And so I'll show you what that looks like. Let's actually remove it from favorites because it's already in my favorites. What I'm able to do is I can take this view like that and I can add it to favorites like that. And again, you could do this for any view and ClickUp that you want to add it to Favorites, save that favorite, and as you'll see now, that's going to pop up at the top of my screen. That way, if I'm anywhere inside of my ClickUp workspace, I want to go back to my my task view. I can easily go click there just like that. And now I'm able to see that my task view there. And so one thing you'll note, if I don't have those favorites pinned like this, it's gonna show up right there. You'll just wanna make sure you go ahead and favorite the pins. That way they pop up at the top like bookmarks would inside of your browser. And so that's one thing you do. Again, my task view, that's where I'm gonna work out of all of the time. One other thing I'll recommend and just give you note of before I jump into how to actually start working here inside of ClickUp is if I come up here to the search bar. So again, if you're seeing all these different spaces, you're trying to find something you got kind of lost here inside of ClickUp, you can come up here to the search bar and you can really search for anything inside of ClickUp. Use these filters too. If you're looking for a specific task that you might be working on. If you're looking for a document that you should be working on, different things like that, you can go ahead and search. If you have ClickUp AI, you can also use ClickUp AI to help with your search, which is super helpful. But again, they have a lot of different filters that you can. It's pretty easy to find things inside of ClickUp, so use that search bar all the time if you're unable to find something that you're looking for inside of ClickUp. And so now after that, I want to dive into how to actually work here inside of ClickUp with your team. So again, your account managers and project managers will be getting those tasks set up for you inside of These different spaces and folders and lists and making sure that all the projects are all set up for you. If there is an ad hoc task that comes up for you, what you're able to do is I can click T on my keyboard again if your slash commands are turned on. So again, this is just kind of your way of creating a task. I need to make sure that this is in the correct location. So this is just something that can speed this process up. You don't necessarily have to do this, but I can use my slash commands. So as you can see here, it says task name or type/4commands. So if I did that, now as you can see, I can use all these slash commands like location if I want to move this to the correct location. Let's say I want to put this in Hannaford list just like that. So now as you can see now that's in that location. If I wanted to change that, I could as well can add the task name. Let's just say this is a task. I can assign this to me just like that if I wanted to add a due date. Again, I can use my slash commands if I want to. Or I can also adjust those all down there too if I want to add a time estimate. Let's say this is going to take 15 minutes, just like that. And so now I can easily create tasks just like that, very ad hoc, put them into the system, get them assigned to me, so on and so forth. That's an easy way to create tasks. You also see the ability to use templates as well. But we have a lot of other content on that. If you want to learn more about templates, I'll put that in the description below. But when you actually go to create a task, you can just go ahead command enter and you'll see that's going to go ahead and create that task for me in this location. As you can see now we have due date today, time estimate, who it's assigned to, so on and so forth. We got that in the right spot. I can also come here to a list too, create a task just like that if I wanted to. However, I find it easy to use my hotkeys and create a task just like that. And so now let's go back to our my task view just like that again, I could click up here at the top and let's talk about how we can actually start working inside of ClickUp. And so again this is going to be the main view that we're going to use. I can also use the Home view. Essentially what this does is it shows all the work that's overdue for me, shows the work that is due today, in the future, so on and so forth. It's all there. Can also plan that out here in this calendar if I wanted to, as we talked about earlier. But what I'm going to do here is I have all of my tasks listed out. As you can see, I have that task I just created. I got to write the blog copy, blog apply, blog proofing, revisions, I have my daily shutdown, pre production, so on and so forth. All of my work is here that is due today. So let's say I wanted to start writing blog copy because that's the work that I need to do right now. So what I'm able to do is I can actually click on this task and if I started working on it right away, I could actually go ahead and start tracking my time right here. Again, I can either do it there or I can also do it right there wherever I want to. If this is listed in the view, I can start my timer just like this. You'll see that also pops up at the top of your screen here. So I can come here and I can stop the timer there. I can do a bunch of stuff. You'll see all the other tasks that I've track time on there as well. So that'll show up directly there. But what I'm able to do now is I'm going to click on this task and as you'll see at the other side of my screen, if I pop this open the subtask sidebar, I'm going to see the whole workflow for what we're working on here. So I'm writing the blog copy, but someone also has to proof this. Someone has to apply blog proofing, revisions, design the imagery all the way down to schedule the blog published date. So I'm seeing the whole workflow right here of what's sort of coming after I'm actually done with this block copy. The one thing I always recommend for teams is that in the parent task, this is where all the communication should live for the specific deliverable. So if you, the individual contributor, your account managers and project managers are all using this parent task to communicate back and forth. That's going to make it very easy for you as an individual contributor to make sure again, you get that context from the account manager, you get any due date, shifts and timeline adjustments from the project manager, and then just get everything into one place to again make sure we're all working Together well, and all of this is going smoothly, so I can put all of that work directly in here, making it very easy for me to get all that done. So if I come back here to this subtask, what can also be helpful is if your team that maybe implemented the system here, if they have descriptions on all these tasks as well, with maybe a link to a standard operating procedure or something like that, that can also be super helpful because I know I need to write the blog copy if I have a description here on how to actually do that. Like what's the standard operating procedure for writing a blog copy? What's that blog copy template? If I have that in the description, that's where I could put that information. In addition, oftentimes you might have some checklist items on some of these tasks too, which are kind of like reminders for you to not forget to do this, this or that. Again, that just depends on how your team has built the system. We always recommend that you have checklist items, that you have those standard operating procedures or templates embedded into this task description to make it very easy for you as an individual contributor. But again, within this task card you'll see a bunch of different things like the status of it, when it's due, the time estimate, any tags that might be on it, who it's assigned to, which is you priority track time, and then relationships. Which shows me I'm actually blocking a task. So if I click on that, as you'll see that shows up here, I'm blocking the proof blog copy task just based off of some dependencies building being built out inside of ClickUp here for me. So, so that's one thing to understand is if I am blocking a task, that's going to show up over here. And so you can also see this. This is the activity section here. This shows me what's blocking. This shows me what I'm waiting on. So if there's a task that maybe I'm assigned to, if I come down here to a different example, I can see what I'm waiting on. So like if I was in charge of design, the blog imagery shows me that I'm waiting on someone to finish the applied blog proofing revisions, and that's not complete, so there's a chance I. I can't actually get to my work there. But this is also gonna show us a bunch of different things. I can add a link here, links start, a zoom meeting, so on and so forth. A lot of different things within this activity section. In addition, one, a couple other Things too. You can switch the layout of this as well. Like if you'd rather this be kind of like that, not the full screen, this can also just be a sidebar as well. I don't like this as one. Cause it gets to be a little bit distracting. Cause there's a lot of different things going on my screen here. So I like to be very focused on that task. So I can just. I like to just do it default just like that for my task card there. One other thing too, as you're working on this as well, you can also go here and minimize this task as well. So what that essentially does is now this comes down to my task tray. So if I go to actually write the blog and I need to pull that task back up, it makes it much easier for me. And if I wanted to remove that from the tray, I could do that, put it back in the tray. So that's just kind of your way to minimize that task as maybe you are working on it. So just take note of that. That's something that you can do if you prefer to. So now one of the benefits of ClickUp that makes it super cool is the ability to really do all of your work inside of one system. Like I don't need to go to Google Docs or anything. If I am writing a blog, I can actually get all that work done inside of ClickUp using ClickUp Docs. So as you can see here, if we again, we all communicate in one place, that makes it even easier. But Jeff left a comment here for adpal and Kevin Stevens. I just interviewed Dwight yesterday for this article. He gave a lot of great insights for writing this book blog. Here's the interview and summary of his answers. As you can see, that links directly out to a document where he took all of his interview notes, which I can actually go to right now. But he asked please let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise then play it. This would be good for you to start writing the first draft. And again I'm the one that's writing the blog copy. So this is perfect timing here. I'm going to click out and all that information that I'm needing is going to be directly here. So this is the interview with Dwight. Just to again get context for us to really understand this blog post, make it better, get a little bit more insights from the actual client for me to actually go ahead and write this. And so again, this is where it becomes super important that you have docs that are all sort of centralized in a place for your Specific clients. And then I can also use these to have templates inside of ClickUp as well for these blog posts or different things like that. As you can see now, if I have a template, I can actually take this and I can duplicate it. If we want to use it again in different things like that, that makes it easier for me to make that very repeatable and have all that in one place for me. But as you can see here at best grocery stores in America, now I need to actually write that. Here's the template for writing it. Outline, keyword, author, so on and so forth. I could actually go ahead and use this here to actually go and write this document inside of ClickUp. And so a couple things here too. We talked about slash commands earlier, but if you are writing inside of ClickUp, it's very easy to use slash commands in here. Like if you need to format this doc at all with different headings, with bolted lists, with checklists, if you want to mention a person on a document as well to get their feedback, different things like that, you can use your slash commands here inside of ClickUp. So if I'm writing this blog and let's say actually go ahead and finish that, I could actually go ahead and copy this link to it and then come back here to this parent task like this and say, hey, Jeff and Kevin or whoever's reviewing this, whoever needs to see it, here is the first draft of this blog. And then I can actually link out directly to that doc. As you can see, that's going to pull up there for them to be able to see. And I just deleted it. There we go. We'll paste that in there so that they can actually go ahead and see that blog. So again, that makes it super easy for them to be able to go directly to that blog if they wanted to. They can actually leave comments directly in this as well. So they can assign these comments to you. They can just say, hey, like calling out a specific section of this blog, what needs to be changed. So it's very easy to proof these blogs, very easy to get feedback on them and a bunch of different stuff like that. In addition, you can also trade this doc as well, just as you did your task. So again, that's going to pop up into my tray down here I have both write blog copy and the actual blog that I'm writing, which makes it very easy for me to navigate to different things like that. And so that's how you would actually go ahead and start working. I'm in ClickUp. Again, I'm Writing the blog copy for me to do that. I actually jump directly into ClickUp to do that. I can write it within a ClickUp doc if I want to. Unless you are a big fan of Google Docs or even Microsoft Word, whatever you're using right now, you can use that as well and just embed those, paste those back into ClickUp comments to make it easy to go ahead and navigate to that and different things like that. But as you can see here, again, those link out directly to those docs. We sort of build those relationships there and make it very easy for the team to sort of collaborate back and forth. But again, I would leave all the communication in the parent task, make it very easy for you and the team to work together. Also, some other cool things to note about this is if you post things like images or different graphics or even videos inside of ClickUp, you actually upload them to that task. If I go to Details, you'll see I have some attachments in this task. What I'm able to do is if someone posts the thumbnail of this blog post, what I can do, just as you could with a video in here as well, I can actually leave comments on specific parts of this image. So I can come here and if I'm proofing this, let's say I don't like this color here, I can actually leave a comment. I can ention someone, whoever and say, hey, I think we should change this color of this text. And so whatever it may be, again you can call directly at that makes it very easy for them to know exactly what you're talking about. And that's gonna assign the comment to them. They can go ahead and once they actually finish that, they can resolve it and then the comment disappears kind of. But it's just in the resolved comments there. So that's a great way to sort of work together. Again, leaving those comments directly on images or again, the same thing works with videos, but that's how you really work together as a team. Once I'm done with this task, I would stop tracking my time and I can actually go ahead and mark this complete. And again, just make sure you leave a comment to whoever needs to know about this. Now that you finished it, make sure you put a link out to that document, making it very easy for the team to find that. In addition, if you wanted to what we always recommend here at the parent task level, when I actually finish my task, I can actually mark that parent task as maybe in progress or internal review, depending on what it actually is. Because now that blog post is internal review. If I mark that parent task, that's just going to help your project managers know where that's at. So as they can see here, that's going to show them, hey, this whole blog is internal review. That's just giving them sort of a high level overview and of where this is actually at. Nothing big that you have to do, but can just be helpful for your project managers like that. And so now one other thing I want to mention that's going to be super important for you as you're working inside of ClickUp is the inbox. And so it's important to know how to use this. Again, I have a whole video on the notification settings as well as how to use your inbox. I'll put that in Description below if you want to go ahead and watch that to learn a little bit more. Because there's a bunch of different ways that you can customize this inbox depending on what you want to see. But we're always aiming for Inbox zero at the end of every day because remember, we want to get all of our communication into ClickUp. We want to put it in those parent tasks. We want to make sure everything is living in one place. So ClickUp is our single source of truth. So remember that as an individual contributor, we want to get everything into the system so every task that you're doing, put it in there so it shows up on your workload so the project managers don't overbook you. And so as you can see here in my inbox, I have different things like important, other, snoozed, cleared. The most important is going to be obviously important. So if I come here to my tasks or sorry, my notifications, as you'll see when someone actually mentioned me, and that's why it's important to mention people when you're communicating with them because then I'll make sure it shows up in their inbox. As you can see here, that's going to show that comment that Jeff left me about his interview with Dwight. So that's going to show up directly here. Again, that was the task that I was actually working out of that I could see there. But it's just showing up directly here for me to be able to see this, to know, hey, I got this, now I can actually start working on my blog. So again, this comes with pairing this with your my task view to know what you can actually start working on. But as I could see here, this is what he said to me. If I want to actually open up this is super helpful to open up those details which I actually just cleared this notification. I didn't want to do that. So let's go to my cleared and I can actually unclear that just like that. But come back here. We're going to jump into those details. If I X out of that, we'll see it right there and then we can scroll this over if we want to to give us a little bit more room. But again that's the task that I was just looking at earlier this blog post. Best grocery stores in America. That's just the task or the comment on this specific task. So if I wanted to I can also show the activity here and so that's going to show me that comment directly there. So it's just easier to navigate here to see sort of that full context of what everything all that's happening there. So I can easily go over to that and see that information again there's a thumbnail and then all the other comments that were left and actually the one that I left here as well with that specific doc that's listed out like that. And so again that's how we communicate in there. After you review that, you respond to that, whatever you need to do. Maybe we just need to leave a thumbs up like that or maybe I need to reply in that thread. I can do that as well. But once we're done with that, we can actually go ahead and clear that notification like that. So that's important again to get down to Inbox 0 every single day to make sure again we're communicating well inside of ClickUp, nothing is slipping through the cracks. And then as a team we're all putting everything into one spot and making sure again we're building those healthy communication habits inside of the system. And so in addition to your my task view, as we saw here, again this is where we're going to be coming to work on our tasks. See our tasks, prioritize the tasks, track time, different things like that. As you can see, if I'm tracking time, I'm also able to, I can edit my time entries if I want to. I can either track time by starting a timer. I can also adjust sort of the distance between the start time and the end time. So there's a bunch of different ways that I can actually go ahead and track my time. If you want to see your recent time entries, you could go up here if you wanted to. You also have a timesheet. So there's really so many different options that you have in terms of tracking your time and Seeing your work inside of ClickUp, don't get overwhelmed by the amount of things. Again, that's why I like having a my task view. So everything is just right here for me to really do everything that I want to do. However, one other thing that you are able to create is something like a personal dashboard. So if you go down to dashboards, as you can see, I can also favorite dashboards as well. So it's going to take me right to my personal dashboard. And essentially what this is, this is just a place for me to kind of get a higher lens of my my test view and see the work that I've done inside of ClickUp, see my time that I've actually tracked in here. And so again, this is just a dashboard that I've created with. Essentially all I'm doing is putting a bunch of cards in here. If you have any questions about how to actually set this up, please leave them in the comments below. I'm just going to go over a brief overview of everything that's included in here, but as you can see, I have a timesheet from last week. This is just a timesheet card here that I can actually go ahead and set up, which is pretty easy to create. As you can see, it's right there if you want to add that. And then all I'm doing is just saying when the assignee is me and I can adjust this to to be the time that I actually tracked last week, as you can see there, versus the time that was tracked this week and what was actually assigned to me there. So all that is just going to be me seeing the work, the time that I actually tracked in the system. So again, nothing crazy there, but just kind of a way for me to visualize that. In addition, I can also have some calculation widgets here for me to be able to see sort of what I closed last week, what I closed this week, what's overdue, what I closed today, open tasks this week, open task next week. So these are all just filtered down by the date closed last one week. Or this one is the date is closed this week, or this one is where the tasks are overdue and this one is where the date was closed today. And so again, there's so many different filters and things that we can create and adjust to make us give a really good sort of overview dashboard for the work that we're doing inside of ClickUp. So again, this is just something that you can set up if you want to. As you can see down here, I can also start to see sort of the work that was closed this week, similar to that date closed is the last one week's all just the work that I've done there. If you want to be able to see that information with what has been closed this week. So the date closed is this week again just another filter and then due in the next seven days so I can get a sort of a overview of what's upcoming. So due date is the next seven days. That will live there for me as well. And then I can also just get some other time tracking widgets there too. So this is just again a dashboard that I can set up if I want to as an individual contributor. Not anything that you have to do, just something that you could do if you'd like to. And so the last thing that I want to talk about here is actually one important task that I highly recommend that you have as an individual contributor that is going to be the daily shutdown. And so this is actually something that I recommend you create and then have this as a recurring tasks that you're gonna be doing every single day. So again, I have another video on recurring tasks if you wanna watch that. I'll put that in the description below, give you way more details on that. But essentially this is just a task that I'm gonna do every single day as an individual contributor. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set that up daily when it's closed, skip the weekends, create a new task and just keep this recurring forever. And so in this task, essentially what it is, this could take me 30 minutes, but as I hit sort of that 4:30, end of the day, whatever time, like 30 minutes before you're gonna get out of the workday, I want to have this task. I could put this time block on my calendar as well. And then in this I want to have a couple of different action items. So for you as an individual contributor, whatever this needs to be, as you can see here, I have different things like all of my meeting follow ups have been completed. So if I'm the one that's actually meeting or talking with clients, I can put that in there, make sure my ClickUp tasks are all resolved and I got those all completed. I want to be inbox zero in email as well. I want to have all of my Open Slack conversations addressed. I want to plan out my day tomorrow. So again you can go into your home view and do that with that calendar. And I also want to make sure my scorecard is completed. If you have sort of a daily scorecard at your company. And so these are just sort of different checklist items I can have. Again, just think about what you want your shutdown routine to be. That could just be following up with all of your emails, making sure your ClickUp is all set up and ready to go for tomorrow. We get down to Inbox zero inside of ClickUp as well. So just make sure you have somewhat of a shutdown routine that again, every single day you're going to be spending about 15 to 30 minutes just going through this and checking these things off one by one by one to make sure you end the day well and then also start the day tomorrow well, because everything will be planned out. And so again, just remember the main thing is have somewhat of a my task view, utilize the home view, whatever you want to do, to have sort of your personal setup created so that you don't get distracted by everything else that's going inside of ClickUp. Because again, it can be very confusing. There's a lot of different views, a lot of different things going on with different menus in here. Just focus on the work that's assigned to you, focus on the tasks that are here, track your time there, figure out the priorities, work with your project managers and account managers to make sure all that work gets on your plate and you're good to go. And again, always make sure you're checking your inbox, communicating with the team inside of ClickUp to get all of that in one place. And so really that's how to use ClickUp for individual contributors. There's obviously a lot of other things that we could go over in different sort of settings that you could set up different ways to really increase your productivity. If you have any questions about that, any other things that you're curious about, please leave those in the comments below and I'd be happy to get back to you or create other videos about that as well. And so one thing I'll leave you with, a super helpful resource is if you want to learn more about how we at zenpilot use ClickUp when it comes to all the different settings, all the different ways to be more productive in the system, how you can set it up for your team, go to zenpilot.com ClickUpGuide and highly recommend you download our 50 plus page guide on really how we use ClickUp. Here at ZenPal, we're ClickUp's highest rated solutions partner. We've helped over 3,000 different teams implement the system. So this is a great guide to really understand our methodology and how we set up ClickUp for different teams. And in addition, if you want our team to really come into your ClickUp workspace and build sort of this whole system and structure with all the templates, all the spaces, and really everything, and train your team on how to use it, go to zempalot. Com, call and book a call with one of our experts. We'd love to help you build that system. Again, we've done this for 3,000 other teams. We love to do the same for you, but that's really all I have for this video. Again, if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section below. Otherwise, I'll see you again in the next video.